


It's Only Smiles

by TheSightlessSniper



Category: Suits (US TV)
Genre: Angst with a Happy Ending, Bisexual Harvey Specter, Bisexual Mike Ross, F/M, I gave Mike and Harvey some of my hobbies out of a self-indulgent need to write something about them, Ignores the last season as I have yet to see it, It's not them who dies!, M/M, Men Crying, Misunderstandings, The Major Character Death Does Not Involve Mike and Harvey I swear, This took a fucking year to write, Trigger warnings for mentions of a car accident and a funeral, men feeling things
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2020-06-28
Updated: 2020-07-06
Packaged: 2021-03-03 18:54:00
Rating: Explicit
Warnings: Major Character Death
Chapters: 28
Words: 40,508
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/24970381
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/TheSightlessSniper/pseuds/TheSightlessSniper
Summary: Harvey's in a strange place in his life. His life after Mike leaves for Seattle keeps changing dramatically, and he just rolls with it for the first time in his life.And then he gets the call from Mike:‘…Rachel. She…’ His voice was shaky, cracking as he continued. ‘She’s gone.’‘She left?’‘The car. Oh god, Harvey, the car—‘
Relationships: Harvey Specter/OFC, Mike Ross/Harvey Specter, Mike Ross/Rachel Zane, Past Harvey Specter/Donna Paulsen, Travis Tanner/Original Female Character
Comments: 35
Kudos: 128





	1. Chapter 1

**Author's Note:**

> So this fic isn't perfect. It's far from it. But it's been a year in the making for me, and I desperately wanted to try and finally get a fic finished that was longer than the 25k word mark. So here it is...my long-ass Marvey Fic, finally finished and being posted.
> 
> There's a lot of tags I need to add, some of which are warnings which I will try to add as I go, but if I forget something that is considered to be a serious trigger, please let me know and I will add it into the tags in some way.
> 
> Now, please ensure that your chair is in the upright position for take-off, and I hope you enjoy the ride.
> 
> The title is taken from the title of a song by Periphery, which I think fits the theme of the fic in some ways - it's based around one of the members of the band losing a family member, and I recommend giving it a listen or having a look at the lyrics at some point. I'm obsessed with this band's music and have been for a long time!
> 
> (EDIT 6th October 2020: I definitely think on some level I was inspired by [Joni Beloni's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joni_Beloni/pseuds/jonius_belonius) fic 'Nothing Like We Used to Be'. So I am going to credit Joni for me unconsciously ripping off her fic! Here's a link: [Nothing Like We Used to Be](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14888600/chapters/34480526))

The wedding was long over, the fanfare a distant dream of a memory. Harvey had long tried to forget that Mike had looked so wonderful in his suit, stood at the altar awaiting his bride-to-be as she so elegantly stepped up the aisle. Mike and Rachel had left soon after, Harvey dropping them off at the airport.

Approximately thirty seconds after they disappeared through the doors, to their new life and a world of new possibilities, Harvey turned away, walked back to the car, and promptly burst into tears behind the wheel.

The landing was excruciating, agonising. Harvey had been falling for a hell of a long time.


	2. Chapter 2

In the wake of Mike leaving for Seattle, Harvey did a great number of silly things, but very little matched up to one of the first things he did.

He had sex with Donna.

At the time, it made sense. He thought it was what he wanted, sincerely he did. He made the effort to make the relationship work, give them both a happy ending, and yet when the rose-tinted glasses cracked and revealed the red-stained splinters in the porcelain, Harvey knew that they could never be the same again. Their romance was done, and the friendship would likely never be quite the same again. Last he had heard, she was in L.A., dating a movie director and working on her theatrical on-screen debut as Ophelia. He was happy for her, but sometimes he wished she was still there, still on the other end of the couch, if only to stave off the loneliness for a few minutes. She always had been a good conversationalist, and a little of it in the echoing chasm that was the condo would have been pleasant distraction.

The condo had become a hollow reminder of all things he’d once had. He’d had a few friends, family even, and things he was proud of despite some of the dubious activities that had achieved them or taken place alongside them.

He wasn’t sure when he started, but it took just two evenings to pack up everything in the condo and have it waiting by the door. In forty-eight hours, he had a wealthy tenant interested in paying him handsomely for the luxury of the city skyline view. The legalities would be dealt with in due time.

That night, Harvey moved his boxes into storage, and stayed the night at the Chilton one last time.

The new place was nowhere near as fancy as the old one. In truth, it was actually kind of a shit-hole, but it was a shit-hole with potential.

The woman who had been selling it had been pretty shocked when she’d come down to let him check the place out, and had almost outright fainted when Harvey had written her a cheque for the asking price on the spot.

She cradled it between frail hands, shaking her head. ‘Mr Specter? Why are you interested in buying a place that needs so much work?’

He would never have admitted it to anyone, but he needed something…else. Something different. Something that wasn’t coming home to a echo chamber, slick with all its smooth wood and metal finishings and marble countertops. Flashy. Sterile. Cold. He wondered whether it was just as much the condo as his own life experiences that had kept him so chilly towards making emotional connections over the years. It had been a bachelor pad, and he had used it as such. He was still a bachelor. It just wasn’t _him_ anymore.

The house he was buying was almost decrepit, a pit, a hell of a fixer-upper. The bathroom hadn’t been updated since the fifties, the kitchen even longer. There was damp up every wall, dirt and grime caking the edges and spiders crawling in every corner.

It felt warmer and more inviting than the condo ever had. Smiling, he signed the cheque and handed it over. ‘I just fell in love.’

He wasn’t sure if he was talking about the shit-hole house, or the man he wished was going to be living with him behind its walls.


	3. Chapter 3

When Harvey was disbarred, the resulting existential crisis, the unadulterated panic of what he would do for what years remained before him, lasted for approximately ten minutes.

At the eleven minute mark, he was plastering holes in the wall with caulk with one hand and sipping a crappy, half-warm beer with the other, warbling along to a Van Halen song he’d long forgotten was on the playlist he’d shoved on the speakers in the background.

In large part, his money had been held in various trusts for years, managed portfolios in a pension plan with experts paid to buy and sell stocks at just the right times to accumulate a small fortune for retirement and financial security. There had been a few dips—what was life without risk?—but more lucky breaks than he could shake a stick at in recent years, and when he broke into his trust for some funds for the house, there was still more than enough to last him for the rest of his foreseeable life. If he made it to the ripe old age of ninety-two, he calculated, then he might have a problem, but between his family’s health history, and his own dietary habits, he doubted he’d make it to seventy, let alone past eighty.

That night, he celebrated and commiserated to himself with Thai food, and halfway through watching a rerun of some old TV show he’d forgotten existed, his phone buzzed.

Mike. _Harvey, I need help. Please call me if you see this message, I can’t get through on my end._

Heart pounding, he lifted the phone, hit Mike’s number, and waited for the call to connect. ‘Mike?’

_‘…Rachel. She…’_ His voice was shaky, cracking as he continued. _‘She’s gone.’_

‘She left?’

_‘The car. Oh god, Harvey, the car—‘_ the sentence cut off, and the next thing he heard was a sob.

Harvey’s appetite disappeared, the chopsticks that had tumbled to the floor from his box of average chicken Pad Thai forgotten at his side. ‘Mike.’

_‘There was—there—she bought a new car, and the brakes…they said the brakes—‘_ Mike sucked in a breath on the other end, trying to steel himself. _‘She died and there was nothing I could do to stop it. She’s dead, Harvey, what do I do?’_

When the call ended, Harvey booked the first flight he could find to Seattle.

The cab stopped next to the house. How much the times had changed; it looked like a movie set house, perfectly-trimmed lawns and neatly-maintained borders of flowers bursting out in all their colourful glory. A rare piece of cinematic suburbia just outside of the city and barely an hour away from the famous forests that had given the Emerald City its iconic nickname.

Harvey didn’t knock, didn’t ring the bell to be let in. He opened the door and stepped inside, and found Mike curled up in a ball on the couch, smelling slightly ripe and clutching what he assumed Rachel’s pillow in his arms. ‘Mike.’

Mike’s voice came out low, croaky. ‘Harvey. I…’

‘When was the last time you showered?’

‘…I don’t know.’

‘Come on.’

When the bath was full, still in his boxers and dazed by the sudden movements, Harvey settled a swaying Mike down into the tub. If he could get him clean, maybe Mike would brush his teeth. If he would brush his teeth, maybe he could get him out of the house. If he could get him out of the house, maybe he would be able to get him to arrange funeral plans. One small step at a time.

Bath first. The shampoo he picked from the side smelled somewhat minty, soothing, cooling. Mike didn’t protest, didn’t do anything as Harvey washed his hair and rinsed the suds away, nor did he move much as Harvey scrubbed down his arms with a soft soaped cloth. He only responded by standing when Harvey pulled the plug, and closing the door as Harvey gave him the privacy to change into clean clothes.

Faded jeans, a plain white t-shirt. The clothes hung limply from his slumped shoulders when he reappeared fresh-breathed, and Harvey wondered as to whether Mike had eaten, drank anything more than a few glasses of water since it happened.

The only coffee that the kitchen housed was instant. He made it anyway, adding sugar and cream to the cup and pressing it under Mike’s nose before setting about finding food. He wasn’t exactly a chef, but in a few minutes, there was a plate of buttered toast in front of each of them, and Harvey waited, watched as Mike stared down at it aimlessly, as if it both had none of the answers and all of the answers in the world and was holding them back from him.

An hour later, when it was cold and the butter had almost re-solidified, Mike took a single bite and left the rest.

The casket was closed. When Mike had described what he’d had to identify, Harvey knew why both he and Rachel’s parents had agreed on it.

White roses and lilies everywhere. The weather had a sick sense of humour for a day of mourning; on the day of the funeral, the sun had shone down, and a wave of bright green spring leaves had passed over the graveyard as Rachel’s polished wooden casket had been carried into the building. She was being cremated, her ashes split between the Zanes and Mike. At least he’d be able to keep her close, wherever he ended up in the world.

Harvey offered to buy Mike a new suit, but he had politely declined. ‘I don’t think Rachel would have wanted me to wear a new suit for the first time to an event to say goodbye for the last time.’ Harvey hadn’t argued, instead getting one of his existing ones dry-cleaned on his own dime. Rachel’s favourite one.

Mike wasn’t ready to say goodbye to any of her possessions yet, but Harvey had helped clean up the house regardless. He left the last cup that she had used to the side of the sink, the last spoon she had stirred cream into her coffee with it, her nude-pink lipstick still clinging to the middle of its shallow basin where she would have licked away the remnants with a satisfied hum. He’d heard her do that in the kitchen area long ago, when Specter Litt had still been Pearson Hardman. He sent Mike to nap upstairs in fresh sheets, and cleaned the rest of the house from top to bottom. He polished some rusty yard work skills he thought he wouldn’t need again and tended to the garden, mowing the lawn and weeding the borders. He took the trash out, set aside anything that could have been Rachel’s for Mike to sort through when he was ready, and prepared for after the funeral ended by buying a few bottles of liquor and good coffee to serve, and filling ice trays, and ordering platters of food for the attendees to pick at.

When Mike stepped back into the house after the funeral, Harvey helped him play host to the other mourners, handling when Robert Zane had drank just one too many and begged for Mike to give his daughter back in front of everyone Rachel had known. Mike couldn’t do anything, couldn’t say anything frozen on a spot like an animal in the headlights, but Harvey did, leading him outside with Rachel’s mother in tow. ‘Robert, I know you are grieving. I know you lost your little girl. But please, think about what this is doing to Mike. He lost his mother and his father to car accident as a kid, and now he’s lost the love of his life to one. This is killing him too.’

_The love of his life_. The words stung on his tongue.


	4. Chapter 4

Harvey had someone in the city check on his new place while he was at Mike’s.

‘You know, Harvey, never took you to take on a little fixer-upper. Although you did take on Mike Ross, so what the hell do I know.’

‘I was disbarred, Tanner. I needed something to do with my time besides sit on my ass and wait to become an even older man.’

‘And yet you’re all the way out in Seattle. You’ve got a leak in your bathroom ceiling, and did you know about the taps?’

‘Shit. The number for a plumber is on my fridge. Call them and tell them where the key is, and I’ll transfer the cost directly to them. Anything non-urgent, I’ll fix when I get back.’

After hanging up, Harvey trailed through Mike’s house. It had been a week since the funeral, since Robert Zane had screamed in his face to give back his daughter like it had been Mike’s fault. When he’d found Mike, curled up in what had been their bedroom and sobbing into the sheets, he’d felt the sting of his own words to Robert even more. Rachel would have known what to do, how to comfort him. It was one thing to lose an older family member to illness or old age. It was another to lose a loved one to an accident, and Mike had lost three people in the same way.

He didn’t even flinch when Harvey sat down on the edge of the bed next to him. ‘Mike, Robert is just mourning. He doesn’t mean it.’

‘That’s the thing. He does.’ Mike sniffed, shaky grip on the sheets tightening. ‘He blames me for bring her here, and for letting her take a job far away from him. Hell, he probably blames me for the fucking car crash.’

‘Rachel was a strong-willed, independent, grown woman responsible for her own decisions. Nobody could or should tame the kind of determination she had in her. She married you and followed you here of her own accord, and I’ll bet she didn’t regret it one bit.’ Harvey reached, stroked a hand down Mike’s shoulder. The motion seemed to soothe him somewhat. He shifted, slowly sitting next to Harvey on the bed.

Mike sighed, leaned his head on his shoulder. ‘She came off her birth control about six months ago. We’d been trying, having trouble. I think it was work stress. The—the accident, she was on her way to a fertility treatment consult when it happened.’ He looked up, agony behind the blue as more tears slipped out.

Harvey put an arm around his shoulders, pulling him in for a full hug. ‘This wasn’t your fault.’

‘Why does it feel like it is?’

‘Because everyone feels like it’s their fault when someone they loves passes.’

‘…Your dad.’

‘I wasn’t there enough. I wanted to call him, the day it happened. I was going to ask him to dinner, catch up.’

‘You couldn’t have known.’

‘Neither could you. You couldn’t have known what happened was coming, so promise me you’ll try not to beat yourself up about this. Let yourself feel the pain, but don’t you dare blame yourself.’

For the first time since he’d last seen him in New York, Mike snorted. ‘I won’t blame myself if you stop blaming yourself.’

It wasn’t quite a laugh, but it felt like a small victory all the time.

When it had all ended, and the last person had gone home, Harvey went around cleaning up. Around halfway through loading the dishwasher, he turned to the sink, and almost had a heart attack at the sight of Mike standing there, the last cup Rachel had used in his hands. He did nothing, said nothing.

And then with quivering fingers, Mike dropped the lipstick-tainted spoon into the cutlery rack, and slipped the mug in with the rest. ‘I’m not going to need a mug with her lipstick on to remember her.’

One week later, not much had changed. Mike was still wandering aimlessly around the house. He’d begun showering and taking care of his body again, but his days were spent staring mindlessly at the TV at some brain-numbingly dull reality show, gazing out of the windows, sat at the kitchen counter for hours on end listening to the electronic whine of the appliances and the buzz of the old fluorescent bulbs blinking and flickering under the over-counter cupboards in that headache-inducing way. He was physically present, but Harvey couldn’t say Mike was really there.

And then one day, something clicked.

When he left the confines of the guest bedroom, Harvey could have sworn that a wild animal had gotten in somehow; something was making a racket, rummaging through the hallway cupboards in search of something.

He didn’t expect to see Mike sat there, surrounded by cardboard boxes and trash bags, skimming through his and Rachel’s shared possessions. Photo albums were visible in one box, the words ‘Send to Zanes’ emblazoned on the side in red marker. The next box was labelled ‘Donations’, already full of strange ornaments that no longer got displayed, kitschy art pictures that didn’t have a place on the walls anymore.

When Mike realised he was being watched, he looked up to him, and then back down to the scattered belongings. ‘If I don’t do this now, I might never do it. Thought I’d better, you know, peel the band-aid off now rather than later.’

In a few hours, Mike had cleared the entire hallway. The next day, he and Harvey tackled the spare room, the living room, the kitchen. After so long, Harvey finally heard Mike laugh again, regaling a story of how Rachel had chased down someone—in heels no less—who had tried to steal her bag in the middle of the street when it had fallen from its resting place in the living room cabinet. He had snickered softly when telling Harvey about how they’d managed to lock themselves out and had to climb in through the kitchen window two days in a row when they’d first moved in because the locks hadn’t worked properly. While pulling the photos out of the frames and scanning them onto his laptop, he had smiled wistfully and told him of little things, silly arguments and making up afterwards with baked goods and beers, couples rituals that had become the norm over time. When the house was finally cleared away, Rachel’s possessions either packed for Robert and Laura, set aside for charity, or packed away for when Mike really needed something of hers near, it was almost disturbing at how barren the place suddenly was. Mike had always been somewhat spartan with his possessions anyway, valuing his own memory’s retention and regurgitation abilities rather than items, but when it came to his own decorations, it truly showed how little he cared for physical things. He kept the wedding photos and the Leica M2 Rachel had gifted him for their anniversary, the blankets they had bought together on the first night when they realised they had left their bedding back in a box in New York. Special things that could last a lifetime or more.

Harvey piled the boxes into Mike’s car, taking position behind the wheel; he wasn’t sure that Mike would want to drive just yet. ‘I can stay as long as you need me to.’

‘The firm is probably going nuts without you.’

‘…Mike, I was disbarred.’

The box of stuff in Mike’s hands almost ends up on the sidewalk. ‘Dis—wh—‘

‘We did some pretty stupid shit. I’m surprised it didn’t come back to bite me in the ass sooner.’

Mike said nothing. Harvey drove them both to the donation banks, dropped off the stuff. It was only as they got back in the car that Mike finally said something. ‘I’m so sorry. If I—’

‘Mike, don’t even think about saying what you’re about to say. If you blame yourself, I’m taking you to the nearest bar, getting you wasted, and making you sing karaoke duets until four AM. If anyone is to blame, it’s me. I took you on knowing you didn’t have a law degree. And…to be honest…’ Harvey sighed with a smile, started the car, ‘I haven’t been this relaxed in years.’

‘Relaxed?’

‘After I was disbarred, I got the best night sleep I’d had since you got _into_ the bar, like this weight was gone. And then it came back after you left, and I tried to fill that friendship hole by having sex with Donna.’

‘I heard. Also heard who she’s dating now…she’s on the track to becoming his fourth wife. When Henry VIII did that, was that one of the ones he divorced?’

Harvey laughed. ‘Yeah, lucky it’s not two or five. Our relationship was like a star dying. Burned bright, collapsed in on itself. Anyway, I kind of…lost my edge after you were gone. I don’t live in the condo anymore, by the way—I bought a run-down place I’m doing up.’

‘Harvey Specter renovating a house? Never thought I’d see the day…’

‘Hey, I do have some skills other than kicking your ass. When it’s all finished, you’ll have to come and stay. We’ll get some drinks, watch some movies…’

‘Are you asking me on a dude-date?’

_Date_. There was that sting again. ‘I mean, I could wine and dine you instead if you want. How does take-out pizza and lukewarm beer sound?’

‘Eh…I’ll take it.’ Mike sighed, smiled. ‘I missed you.’

And there it was again. ‘I missed you too.’

Dropping off the stuff to Rachel’s parents was the really difficult part. Harvey had assisted him in preparing, gotten shipping labels in case they wouldn’t be able to take it back on their flight with them, and even helped him make a box of photos, precious memories from their wedding, their holidays, even some which had just been Rachel relaxing in their garden with a book and a coffee. Things Robert and Laura had missed for them to return home with, anything to give them one more thing to remember their baby girl.

Robert said nothing to him when he saw him standing in the doorway, simply turning back to stare out of the window, and Laura beckoned them back out of the room. ‘He’s not…he’s still not taking this well.’

‘I know.’ Mike put down the box he was holding and gave her a hug. ‘Look…I don’t know how often we’ll see each other after this. Believe me, you’re still family to me, and if there’s anything you ever need, just tell me and I’ll be there. But I don’t know if Robert will ever not blame me a little bit for taking Rachel to Seattle in the first place.’

‘He’ll come around, Mike.’ Laura pulled back, cupped his cheeks even as a few tears slipped down her own. ‘You. You come home to see me if you’re ever in town. You’re still my son-in-law, whatever happens in the future.’

Mike swallowed and nodded. ‘Thanks. I made a little something for you in there. It’s just a few photos of Rachel, and some from our wedding. I thought…you know, anything with your little girl. She was the most photogenic person I’ve ever met, I don’t think I ever got a bad one with her in it.’

It was a tearful goodbye. Mike helped her put the boxes inside the door, and gave her one final hug. ‘I’m not sure what I’m going to do without her, Laura. What comes after something like this?’

‘You’ll know when it happens.’ She sniffed, gave him a sad, motherly smile. ‘Don’t be a stranger, honey.’


	5. Chapter 5

When Harvey returned to New York, Travis Tanner was standing outside of his place, holding out a set of keys. ‘There’s no leak anymore. But if you hear a weird sound, that’s the raccoon I had a buddy at Animal Control put in the walls.’

He snatched them out of his hand. ‘How much did it cost?’

‘The raccoon, or the leak issue?’

‘Travis.’

‘Relax, I gave them your email, bill should be with you in a couple of days. How’s Mike doing? Stupid question, I know.’

Harvey shrugged, sighed as he beckoned Travis through the door. ‘Robert lost it at him at the funeral. Kept asking him to give Rachel back to him like he blames him for the fucking crash, for christ’s sake. Coffee?’

‘Decaf. Jesus…I know he’s in pain, but that’s fucked up. What about you?’

‘Rachel was a friend, but we weren’t that close.’

‘Not what I meant.’

Harvey paused. ‘What _do_ you mean?’

‘No lawyer in his right mind risks livelihood and prison time by hiring a guy they don’t know anything about. You were disbarred, and you still went to the reason why when he needed you. Come on, how long?’

Harvey huffed humourlessly, pouring decaf grounds into the filter. ‘We’re not discussing this.’

Travis smirked and sat down on one of chairs at the kitchen table. ‘Goddamn, that bad, huh?’

No point in denying it. ‘…Yeah. It’s never going to happen. And even if it could, his wife just died. I’m not going there even if you gave me a passport, Visa, and a credit card with no limits.’

‘Have you ever asked him if he is?’

‘What, bi?’

Travis’s eyes couldn’t have rolled harder if he’d pulled them out of his head and flicked them across the kitchen table with his fingers. ‘No, Republican. Come on, Harvey.’

‘I never asked. Never needed to.’

‘You know, in this day and age, it’s definitely considered a massive insult to assume someone’s sexuality and gender.’

‘In this day and age, it’s also still horrendously inappropriate to ask your best friend who just lost his wife in such a horrific accident that they couldn’t have an open casket at the funeral whether he’s into dick and wants to throw down.’ The coffee was losing appeal. If it wasn’t barely ten AM, Harvey would have cracked open the scotch and sunk a few shots. Regardless, he made the drinks, and slammed the cream and sugar down in front of Travis, scattering some of the granules across the counter. ‘Even if there was any chance, I can’t. I just can’t.’

‘I know. I guess what I’m really trying to say is “Never say never”.’

‘You didn’t just quote a Bieber song title at me.’

‘Oh, I did.’ Travis finished the coffee quick, then headed back to work.

Travis returned later that day, dressed down from his usual work suit. ‘Time to rip out your shitty, woodworm-infested kitchen units, old man. Didn’t go with the marble countertops again?’

‘I’m out of a job now, Tanner. Can’t be having huge slabs of expensive polished marble anymore.’ He knocked another panel out, chucking it to the side. ‘The maple will look good with a clear varnish, though, and the countertops are still treated hardwood. They’ll outlive both of us assholes.’

‘Speak for yourself—I intend to live to a hundred.’

‘Not if you insult my choice of couch again.’

‘You’re asking for it—it doesn’t even look like something from IKEA. It looks like a _knockoff_ of something from IKEA.’

‘It’s temporary, I swear.’ Harvey unscrewed the next cupboard door. ‘How’s the family?’

Travis chuckled and lifted one of the shelves out of the next countertop section. ‘Karina wants to go skiing, but the kids want to go to DisneyWorld. And I just want to go somewhere it’s sunny, the drinks are good, and I can finish reading one book that isn’t about a rainbow-coloured fish or a very hungry caterpillar.’

‘You know that’s not going to happen until they go off to college.’

‘Just one book. I’d give my left nut to finish reading one damn book.’

Harvey grinned. ‘Didn’t you give them both up when you had your vasectomy?’

‘You really want to finish building this kitchen yourself, don’t you?’ He shook his head, rolled his eyes. ‘What about you? You wanna have kids one day?’

‘Thought about it. But I’m not getting any younger, and I’m not sure I want to be seventy and have everyone thinking that my kid’s dad is his grandpa. Then again, the more I’ve been thinking about it, the more I want what Marcus has.’ He stopped, fiddling with the screwdriver between his fingers. ‘The person I’d want to do it all with, though…it’s probably never going to happen for me. I’ll just have to settle for being Uncle Harvey.’

The conversation went no further, and they ripped the rest of the counters out with nothing but the sound of the TV as company. Travis bade him goodnight, and Harvey was just about to slip his freshly-showered body under the sheets when his phone buzzed. ‘Mike?’

‘ _You know your offer for me to stay with you? How soon can I cash that in?_ ’

‘Uh, anytime, but you might have to sleep on a mattress on the floor, with no bedroom door right now. Why?’

‘ _…I’m not…the house feels weird. Seattle, it feels weird being here. I’m sorry, I shouldn’t have called—_ ‘

‘Mike, talk to me.’

For a moment, Harvey wondered if he hung up; the silence went on for a good ten seconds before he finally spoke up again. ‘ _Here doesn’t feel like home anymore._ ’

Wandering into the hall, Harvey glanced into the spare room. He was right; Mike would have to crash on a mattress on the floor, probably with the company of a few spiders and—if Travis hadn’t been kidding about his buddy at Animal Control—a pissed-off raccoon ripping his face off. He’d wouldn’t even have a bedroom door yet; the old ones had been in the same state as the kitchen suite.

Even so, Harvey’s heart thumped, his stomach fluttering. ‘You’re welcome any time you want.’


	6. Chapter 6

Mike turned up at his door the next afternoon, small case in hand and long coat wrapped around him in spite of the odd wave of warmth that had suddenly hit New York that particular week. Harvey could have sworn that it was a completely different person to the man he’d left in Seattle, however; Mike looked pale once more, nervous, tired as if he hadn’t slept in days, and when he stepped into the house, he swayed on the spot like he was about to pass out.

Harvey directed him to the couch, putting his bag next to the stairs to take up later. ‘Missed me already, huh?’

The smile was real, but small. ‘The house feels like a shell. It’s like when she died, she took all the life with it. I was sat there, watching tv and this show we watched came on, and I automatically went to yell to her that it was starting…’ his face dropped, ‘I forgot she was gone. I forgot about it. And then I was looking around the room…and it dawned on me that it wasn’t our house anymore. And that meant it wasn’t mine anymore either.’

Harvey sank down in the seat next to him, uncurling an arm and letting Mike press his face against his shoulder as the tears came. ‘You can come back to New York. Or travel. Or set up shop in another city. I doubt Rachel would have begrudged you going somewhere to deal with this. She wasn’t like that.’

‘I know, but I can’t…I was the reason she was even there—‘

‘Mike. No. You cannot blame yourself, remember?’

‘She died because she was in Seattle with me.’

‘And if it had been New York, she might have died from stepping off the sidewalk and getting hit by a cab. She might have died from being shot, or stabbed, or from food poisoning, or tripping down the stairs, and it wouldn’t be your fault unless you were actually there making it happen. You’re just a man who fell in love, got married, and moved to a city with his wife.’ Harvey leaned closer, wrapped both arms around him. ‘You’re just a human being. You can’t stop a car crash unless you already know it’s coming, and you didn’t know. You couldn’t have known.’

It took a long time for Mike to stop crying. Harvey held him through it all, the hum of the crappy daytime TV and intrusive car horns on the street outside white noise. When Mike pulled away, composed himself, he pushed tissues into his hands. ‘You must be exhausted. Come on, I’ll show you the spare room.’

When they reached the doorless frame, some of the personality Harvey missed returned. ‘Looking to peep at my goods, Harvey?’

‘Ha ha. The doors were broken. New ones arrive tomorrow, Travis is helping me fit if you’re up for helping us out.’

Mike’s eyebrows rose. ‘As in Travis Tanner? You’re friends now?’

‘He’s okay. Still a smug bastard, still a dick, but he’s okay.’ Harvey gestured to the next door along. ‘Bathroom is there, although be careful with the cold tap on the sink—it’s actually the hot tap, and the hot tap is also the hot tap. Don’t ask me how they managed that, I only found out when I almost scalded my fingerprints off. Also no piss-taking about the bathroom. House used to belong to an old lady, so everything looks like it belonged to an old lady. Use whatever you need.’

Leaving Mike to get settled, Harvey headed back down to the kitchen, digging out the take-out menus. There was no way in hell he wanted to think about cooking tonight.

‘So Travis has two kids, a beautiful wife who is both an ex-model and a doctor?’

‘Yep. I still say he hypnotised her and paid off the officiant and witnesses.’ Harvey threw another chunk of tofu in his mouth and picked up some Sichuan string beans with his chopsticks. ‘Anyway, he’s not so bad, and after the whole disbarring and everything, he’s about the one person besides you and Jessica that actually keeps in touch.’

‘So he’s coming over to help with the counters, the doors…’

‘And probably drink all my beer.’ At that, Mike laughed, and Harvey felt that sweet sensation of victory all over again. If he could keep Mike laughing, maybe he could help him cope just a little better.

Mike picked up a batter-covered chicken ball with his own chopsticks, dunking it in bright orange sweet-and-sour sauce and playing around with it. ‘Whenever we watched a movie, Rachel used to steal swigs of my drinks. There was this one time we both wanted one but had just one left, and we didn’t want to go out to get more, so we raced each other to the fridge. I managed to trip, smashed my foot into the kitchen counter and broke two of my toes.’

‘So after you got back from the emergency room, she won the beer?’

‘Nope—she tripped over me, fell flat on her face and smashed her nose into the refrigerator door. She got an ice pack, a tampon up each nostril, and some wicked-strong painkillers, and I got six weeks of being unable to wear a shoe on my left foot and a nurse laughing his ass off when Rachel kept on making foot and toe puns.’ Mike snorted, nibbling on the edge of the chicken ball. ‘The doctor thought we were in some kind of domestic incident and started asking us weird questions, and Rachel started laughing so hard the tampons shot out of her nose and hit her in the leg.’

‘Oh god, what happened after that?’

‘We explained what happened, and she looked at us, stared us dead in the face and then just said “You two are the most ridiculous people I’ve treated all night, and I just had to pull a Donald Trump bobble-head out of an inebriated frat-boy’s ass.”’

‘Hey, you remember what Laverne said in “Scrubs”. “There’s no Lost-and-Found Box…there’s an Ass Box.”’

Mike’s expression softened, his laughter dying down to a chuckle. ‘As painful as it was, I would not change that night for anything. That was when we decided to start trying to have a baby.’

Harvey nodded, chewed another clump of sticky rice. ‘You two would have had a great family. Accident-prone as all hell, but brilliant and beautiful all the same.’

‘Of course they would, they would have been hers. They would have been all Rachel.’

Before he could say it out loud, Harvey stopped himself. _You’re beautiful too_.

The next morning, Travis turned up at the front door. ‘You have me until one PM, I got called into the office by my assistant.’

‘Preparing for trial?’

‘What else? Heard from Mike?’

And it was at that moment that Mike chose to walk down the stairs, jeans slung low on his hips and tugging on a t-shirt haphazardly over himself. Harvey turned back to Travis, the other’s smirk suddenly making a comeback. ‘Not what you think,’ he whispered sharply.

The day started off promising, and quickly turned into a comedic disaster. Installing one counter, Harvey had screwed one the brackets into the wall and slotted the counter into place, and it was at that point that—in all his smugness—Travis pointed out one flaw. ‘You couldn’t have told me that before I drilled all the holes into the wall?’

‘Hey, I went out to take a call! You should have checked before drilling.’

‘Same thing I said about Hardman after it came out that he caught the Clap off of that prostitute.’

Harvey shook his head, grin growing. ‘Hey, I said prostitution should be legalised and regulated to reduce STD spread. After that, pretty sure Hardman felt the same.’

Between stifled chuckles, Mike made a flipping motion. ‘The measurements make it easy to put the cabinets the other way and it’ll still work. If you’re finished talking about venereal disease and name partners of Christmas Past, let’s flip it over and the brackets should line up fine. Same deal with the doors.’

‘If this doesn’t work, you’re buying dinner tonight.’

The counters went into place, the doors following. But then they encountered problem number two. ‘Are you shitting me? The sink doesn’t fit?’

Travis measured the sink hole, then the sink itself. ‘They fucked it up by about a quarter inch. Happen to have a jigsaw cutter handy?’

Harvey gesticulated with the screwdriver. ‘Sorry, Tanner, I left it the pants I sent to the dry-cleaners yesterday—No I don’t have a jigsaw cutter! Can we at least get the other section in place so there’s somewhere to put more take-out later?’

‘Not unless you want to be taking apart and rebuilding everything we just put in, in reverse,’ Mike huffed, sweat dripping down his brow from the exertion; he’d been holding the same part of the cabinet steady for almost twenty minutes. ‘Can I let go of this now? I feel like this is leading to a hernia.’

With the issues with the kitchen unresolvable, they moved onto the doors upstairs, but even that was wrong somehow. Whoever had cut the pieces had either been drunk, high, or just really didn’t like him because as well as a counter not cut right, the doors were around two inches too short for the door frames.

At that point, with Mike in hysterical laughter on his mattress, and Travis stuffing down the need to follow suit, Harvey gave up. ‘So…pizza?’

It was the first day since his trip to Seattle that he hadn’t seen Mike cry.


	7. Chapter 7

On day five of Mike staying with him, Harvey realised that he had a problem.

An angry phone call to the company—and a threat to sue—later, Harvey had new doors of the correct size, and a freshly-cut countertop delivered to his door. This time, the sink slotted into place, the doors went on the hinges, and with very little effort, the house suddenly looked ten times more put together than when he’d first moved in.

The fact that it was starting to feel a lot more like a home with Mike there was the real issue.

While in Seattle, Mike’s home had been wonderful, beautiful, every suburbanite’s dream house ready and waiting for an extra addition to the family to arrive to complete it. But with Rachel gone, and his father-in-law distancing himself, the disconnect between Mike and his surroundings when sat in that huge house had been glaringly obvious even before that phone call a few days ago had taken place. It was clear exactly what he was trying to say without really saying it.

Mike wanted to come back to New York, but he had no idea how to do that after everything that had happened and without feeling like a guilt-ridden failure.

Harvey sighed, pouring the contents of the kettle into the cups and letting the teabags steep as he mulled it over. They’d have to sell the house. If Mike didn’t want to live in his spare room for the foreseeable future, they would need a new place to either buy or rent, and then there was the issue of shipping his belongings. They’d need a storage space until he had a new apartment.

It was only when Harvey went to add milk to his Lady Grey that he realised he’d been referring to everything as if it was both his and Mike’s responsibility, and had to remind himself that as much as he wanted it, they did not come together as a unit. Not a package deal. Not boyfriends.

Sweat dripping down his forehead, Mike trailed down the stairs, dropping the hammer and screwdriver he’d usurped by the living room door. ‘You have a bedroom door. No paint on the doorframe next to it anymore, but you have a bedroom door.’

‘Lucky I haven’t re-painted yet. Speaking of which, I was thinking just going beige. What do you think?’

‘I think you suck at interior design and have no sense of how to personalise your home beyond a stack of your favourite movies and a bottle of expensive scotch on an end table.’

‘Says the guy who has a house with all white walls inside and out.’

‘I have a lot of photos on the walls, though.’

Harvey rolled his eyes, sipped his still-too-hot tea. ‘What do you suggest, then?’

‘What about for the bedroom, going for a stormy slate blue accent wall? You could paint the rest in either a different shade of blue, or white, or grey…something calming. Might help you sleep better.’

‘I’m not the one not sleeping, though. Still can’t relax?’

Mike had the courtesy to look a little sheepish. ‘Sorry I kept you up. I just feel really…torn between here and Seattle.’

‘So move back to New York. I’ll help you sell the house and find a new place here. And you can stay here as long as you need to in the meantime.’

Mike sighed. ‘Thanks, but…it was Rachel’s house. It was our house, that we picked out and we bought together. I feel guilty selling it on so soon, like I’m throwing away everything we had together right after she’s gone. I feel like I’m meant to want to keep the house to remind me of her and the life that we planned to have and I’m betraying her even thinking about it, but…I don’t know how much longer I can live there knowing she’s never going to come through that front door again.’ He played with his mug’s handle. ‘I don’t want to be reminded of everything that was stolen from me on that day every time I wake up for the rest of my life.’

Harvey’s heart screamed. He could tell Mike to stay, and to abandon Seattle and stay with him. The idea—if he did actually miraculously lean that way—that Mike could fall in love with him itched in the back of his brain in all of its cruel improbability and twisted selfish hopefulness. Then the better part of his brain overruled, his conscience stamping the thought flat. No, he was not going to think like that. Thinking like that was more than a slippery slope to mess around on.

Harvey sucked in a breath. ‘Okay, here’s an idea. Stay here a month. Give yourself a good rest, and then go back to your house in Seattle with a fresh mind and stay there a month. If during that time you still feel like it’s the wrong place to be—‘ he gestured upwards with his thumb— ‘there is always a room for you here until you figure everything out and get the house sold. And like I said, I’ll help you with anything you need me to do.’

He didn’t expect Mike’s hand to cover his and squeeze. ‘Thanks. You have no idea how grateful I am to have you in my life.’

‘Anytime, Mike.’ _Anything for you_.


	8. Chapter 8

Between himself, Tanner, and Mike, the run-down shit-hole Harvey had spent all that money on had begun a wonderful transformation, and taking Mike along for the ride.

Maybe it was a kind of therapy for him, because once Mike got started on helping, Harvey couldn’t stop him, sitting back and watching him whizz from room to room, plastering walls, polishing the wooden floors, replacing the sealants around every window and door and taking the draughtiness of the place down with it. When Harvey went out one day to go look at a replacement for the couch that Tanner refused to stop taking the piss out of, he returned home late that afternoon—empty-handed save for a few new sheets for his bed to match the stormy accent wall—to find Mike on his hands and knees priming all of the wooden baseboards for a new coat of paint. Whatever it was doing for Mike, it seemed to be helping him escape from his own head and deal better; slowly but surely, he was having more moments of being like the Mike Harvey remembered hiring all those years ago in that room at the Chilton.

Halfway through staining one of the kitchen cupboards, Mike shook his head. ‘I can’t believe this place is coming together this quick.’

‘Uh…Mike, I can—you’ve been putting more hours into this place than I have.’

Mike shrugged. ‘Sorry. It’s been kind of peaceful. Relaxing.’

‘You call sanding old paint off baseboards relaxing?’

‘No, but…it’s been keeping my mind off things. It’s been keeping my mind off things but not to the point where I’m not dealing with stuff.’ He stopped, sat with his back against the refrigerator door. ‘I know you can hear me at night.’

‘If you ever do need to talk, I’m right in the next room.’ Harvey pulled both of their drinks off the table, passed Mike’s over. ‘When my dad died, I spent months coming home from work, and immediately bursting into tears. It’s not like I called my dad every day, or met up with him all the time. It was just remembering that even if I wanted to, I couldn’t. I kept just listening to the last voice message he left me, about meeting up for a drink one night. Of all the people I needed to get through it, it was the one person who would never be able to be there again.’

Mike frowned. ‘You never told me that.’

‘…I never told anyone that until just now.’ Harvey looked over, eyes locking with his companion’s stunned ones.

Mike gaped. ‘Not even Donna? Jessica?’

He shook his head. ‘I couldn’t. I just…couldn’t.’

They fell back into companionable silence for a while after that, finishing the work on the kick-boards and counters just as the sun began to go down. Right as Harvey was about to head up the stairs to shower, Mike grabbed his forearm. ‘You can talk to me too, if you need to.’

Cool fingertips, warm palms. He’d never noticed when shaking Mike’s hand before, or when he’d touched his hand the other night. He covered Mike’s with his, shot him a grateful smile. ‘Thanks.’

As he took his hand away, the wedding band still wrapped securely, devotedly around Mike’s finger caught and pinched his skin.

The month flew past much faster than Harvey would have liked. It felt like all too soon, he was driving Mike to the airport to go back to Seattle.

‘Remember, if you need to come back, or if you need me to come over, just say so. Not like I’ve got as much to do on the house anymore.’

Mike chuckled. ‘You’re welcome. Even if it feels a little less…’ he shrugged, ‘I feel like I need to go back just to see.’

Hugging goodbye was like getting kicked in the gut. Mike’s arms looped around his chest, holding tight and resting his forehead against his shoulder for just a few seconds before pulling away and picking up his bag. ‘I’ll miss you.’

‘You too.’ _You have no idea how much_.


	9. Chapter 9

Whether Mike was waiting to see how he felt about Seattle now, or whether he thought he had outstayed his welcome in Harvey’s new home, Harvey didn’t hear from Mike for almost two days, barring a courtesy ‘Home safe!’ and a shot of him making a coffee that was oddly cinematic in colour. He always had been a talented photographer-editor.

The message came through Facetime, while Harvey was stood in the kitchen with a sandwich in hand. ‘Aren’t you glad you didn’t call while I was squat-and-surfing?’

_‘Way too much information, Harvey.’_

He got the question out of the way quick. ‘How’s Seattle?’

Mike’s face almost imperceptibly changed. _‘It’s alright.’_

Almost. ‘How is it really?’

_‘Quiet. Work is draining. I miss New York. I’m gonna give it a month, like you said, but…’_

‘I’d better make sure the bathroom’s finished by the time you get back then.’

Mike smiled. _‘How’s the hot tap issue?’_

‘Uh…’ Harvey pursed his lips, put the sandwich down and brushed the crumbs off his hands. ‘I fixed the hot cold tap issue, but now somehow every tap in the bathroom is now cold. I don’t even know how that worked, but I basically took a shower in the kitchen sink this morning.’

Mike snorted, buried his face in his hands. _‘Oh man, please tell me you know a good plumber.’_

‘Nope. Gonna try and fix it after—‘ he gestured to the sandwich on the plate. Harvey didn’t want the conversation to end. He knew what he really wanted to ask, what he wanted to encourage Mike to do, but he held it back. ‘Also Tanner dropped by yesterday and says to say hi.’

_‘Does his wife know you two are spending so much time together?’_

‘Nope. We’re having a sordid, sleazy affair, doing it secluded alleys and cheap motel rooms. The whole thing, and she has no idea.’ Harvey shook his head. ‘Him being my friend now doesn’t make me miss you any less. Don’t worry. You’ll always be my formerly fraudulent associate.’

Mike grinned. _‘Good to hear. Now go finish your sandwich and fix the bathroom. I like my water hot.’_

As Harvey hung up, the smile he’d forced on his face faded. Seeking distraction, he cracked open the kitchen door, leaning against the frame and watching the stillness of the small back garden. It was unusual to be able to get a garden in the city, and it was less a garden and more of a tiny courtyard anyway. Even so, Harvey let his mind wander. He could build a brickwork barbecue against the wall, put a big basin and a fire pit underneath for stir-frying food outdoors in the summertime. There wasn’t the space for any kind of sports to be played, but a couple of deckchairs and a small table would fit. Maybe a wooden loveseat for Travis and his wife to sit at while the kids decided if they were going to be friends or foes that day. There was Mike, standing at the barbecue, poking burgers and hotdogs and sauce-smothered chicken, coming up to him with a smile and embracing—

He shook the image away, ignored the painful ache below his ribs and turned back inside.

That night, Harvey couldn’t sleep.

He turned from one side to the other, staring at the wall, then to the window, then back to the wall, and then the ceiling, all views devoid of distraction. It wasn’t that he wasn’t tired; spending all day fixing the taps in the bathroom had taken it out of him and his already temperamental shoulder. He just couldn’t switch off.

There was usually one of two surefire ways he could find sleep. One of them was sat in the kitchen cabinet with approximately half of the bottle remaining, the accompanying ice and twist available right next to it in the refrigerator. The other was either a phone-call to an old ‘friend’ away, or…

Harvey chose the latter, one hand slipping upwards to grasp the bars of his headboard as the other slid down to its destination. Usually he’d sate the urge quick and fall straight to sleep, but instead he indulged, breathing steadily as he stroked up and down to bring himself to hardness. When he’d reached full stiffness, he lifted his hips up to meet his hand, planting his feet on the mattress and rolling up into his own welcoming grip. In the darkness, the guilt of fantasy abated somewhat, and he let his imagination form the image of Mike there, above him, head tilted up and moaning loud as he rode him. Orgasm came fast, shuddering, messily splattering up his abdomen.

As soon as it was over, Harvey was suddenly too wracked with guilt to sleep.

When he rose at seven the next morning, barely three hours of fitful sleep under his belt, he immediately headed to the gym, running, cycling, swimming, pushing himself to his limits as if it could stem the flowing shame. A few people leered in his direction, one of them obviously licking their lips as they passed. A young woman on a static bike stuck her buttocks out a little further than necessary, obviously for his benefit. For any other person, maybe even a younger him, it would have been a pornographic fantasy, but now all he saw was empty conquests. A potentially interesting one-night-stand, but zero long-term romantic prospects. At what point had he decided he wanted to settle down? He had no idea, but he knew that he didn’t just want a one-nighter with anyone anymore. _You got old, Specter. But it’s not necessarily a bad thing_.

When he got back home, he immediately set to work on the house again. The kitchen was finally finished. The bathroom taps were fixed, would work until the new bathroom suite stopped being back-ordered and got delivered. His bedroom—the very place where he had committed the deed he was trying to distract himself from—was completed within a few hours. He barely ate, barely stopped at all, just worked and worked until finally he crashed onto his shitty couch to avoid the paint fumes in his room, and immediately fell into a dreamless sleep.

He did the same the next day, and the next, and the next. He didn’t let himself stop. He couldn’t.

Tanner showed up at his door on the Monday of the new week, and was immediately stunned. ‘Holy shit. Did you work night and day to get this place done?’

‘Yep.’ Harvey waved him in, immediately handed him a scotch. ‘All that needs to be done is the new bathroom suite.’

‘Taps?’

‘Fixed, for now. Should last.’

Travis narrowed his eyes. ‘Come on. What’s up? You missing Mike?’

‘Not going there.’

Travis smirked. ‘Harvey, come on, tell me.’

Harvey pursed his lips. ‘Not going there.’

‘Did he come back? Did something happen?’

‘Travis…’

‘It took a long time for us to be real friends, man. Don’t shut me out now.’

‘…Nothing happened. Nothing. He’s not back, he’s still in Seattle. I just…agh, this is…I know I’ve had dreams about him before, but the other night I fantasised about him.’

He was met with a deep frown. ‘And…?’

‘He’s just lost his wife, and there’s no way it would ever happen.’ Harvey sank down into one of the chairs at the kitchen table. ‘I shouldn’t be thinking about him like that.’

‘Harvey, you’re allowed to have fantasies. I used to have fantasies about Jodie Foster all the time when I was younger, and she’s only publicly dated women.’

Harvey raised an eyebrow. ‘Jodie Foster? Really?’

Travis raised one back. ‘Harrison Ford? Really?’

‘…Point taken. Continue.’

‘All I’m saying is that, a fantasy is a fantasy, like having a crush on a celebrity. You’re not pushing a relationship on an unreceptive person, and you recognise healthy boundaries in reality that don’t have to be there in imagination. If you were cornering Mike in an elevator and screaming “Love me, Mike” in his face, or feeling him up without his permission, THEN I’d think it’s a problem. What were you even doing in this fantasy that was so bad?’

‘Nothing particularly bad, just—’ The memory of the fantasy flashed back to him, snippets clear as day; Mike atop him, moaning loud and free for the world to hear. The part that hurt the most to relive was the kiss, the idea of it, of foreheads pressed together and breath drifting over lips, of their mouths crushing together in perfect synchronicity. He swallowed, the crushing feeling of coming back down to Earth taking over. He gestured to the air. ‘You’re in love, you know what it’s like.’

Travis shook his head, smile growing. ‘Wow…I thought you had it bad, but…you’re really completely and utterly in love with him, aren’t you?’

Harvey said nothing. He didn’t need to.


	10. Chapter 10

When Mike next called, there was a new person in his life.

The tiny creature was fluffy, mewing against his cheek and shoving its nose against his jaw insistently looking for attention. _‘Someone at work rescued a bunch of them.’_

‘I leave you for five minutes, and you turn into a spinster cat-lady on me. How could you, Mike?’ Harvey joked, although even he had to admit, at least it wasn’t a dog; too much cleanup required, too codependent for his tastes.

_‘Ha ha. My bleeding heart, as you put it, reaches further than just for humans. Dogs, cats—‘_ he punctuated the word by giving the kitten a kiss on the forehead— _‘anything cute and fuzzy, I’m a sucker for.’_

‘You named it yet?’

_‘Have you seen the markings on him? It looks like he’s wearing a monochrome version of the Iron Man suit.’_

‘You’re calling him Tony Stark?’

Mike narrowed his eyes. _‘Well I’m not gonna call him something generic like “Fluffy”!’_

‘Is little Tony going to have his own Avengers Tower, a house in Malibu, a tiny Iron Kitty suit?’

_‘Okay, bye Harvey—‘_

‘I’m kidding! He’s adorable. Anyway, how’s Seattle?’

Mike’s face tightened. Whatever the real reaction was, Harvey wasn’t seeing it. _‘It’s…fine. I mean, it’s about as good as it can get after…yeah. No. It’s fine.’_

‘Mike, what are you not telling me?’

_‘Nothing.’_

‘Mike.

Mike sighed, cuddling the kitten closer. _‘Seattle definitely isn’t the right place anymore. I was worried New York wouldn’t feel like home anymore either, but spending the month with you kind of wiped out that fear.’_

‘You want me to fly out and help you deal with all the details?’

_‘…I kind of already found someone to buy the house.’_ He shot Harvey a strange look, sheepish and guilt-ridden. _‘You sure I can still stay with you?’_

Even as Mike asked, Harvey’s heart leapt, pounded faster. ‘Wouldn’t have offered if I hadn’t meant it. Arrange for your stuff to get shipped. I’ll make sure you have a real bed this time. And before you ask…it might be nice to have something cute and fluffy running around until you find a new place.’

Mike’s face relaxed, smile breaking through. _‘Thank you. So so much. You have no idea how grateful I am for how much you’ve done for me. I don’t know how I’m ever going to repay you for this.’_

‘You’re family. Don’t ever be afraid to ask me for help.’

The call ended, and the first thing Harvey did was pump his fist in the air. _You’re coming home_.

In the lead-up to Mike’s arrival, Harvey worked double-time.

The new bathroom finally arrived and got fitted. The kitchen was already finished, and the living room soon followed suit, turning from a slightly dingy mess into a fully-fledged bachelor den with a huge TV attached to one wall and shelves full of movies flanking both sides of it. On a whim, he bought game consoles for the first time since his thirties, and a spare controller for Mike to get involved too. The new couch was all luxurious velvet and faux leather—Harvey reasoned that he might as well try and be a little more cruelty-conscious and forego the real deal—and infinitely more comfortable than the previous one. He recycled the bedroom doors that had been cut incorrectly, turned them into a coffee table to put his feet up on (and tell Mike to take his feet down from). Out of nowhere, everything slotted into place, and when Harvey finally stopped after beginning to build the brick barbecue, it took a moment to sink in exactly how far the place had come along.

Still sweaty from the work, he walked down to the nearest convenience store to stock up on snacks. The physical strain of redecorating a house had kept him in good shape and even improved what Jessica had once described as his ‘lust handles’, joking he had grown a little bit of a belly as the years had gone on. He’d never been all that heavy, but he would have been lying if it hadn’t made him hit the gym a little more often after that.

With that thought in mind, he returned home with heavy bags filled with healthier food than usual; vegetables, fruits. He’d swapped out some of the processed meats for eggs, electing to buy chicken but had replaced his usual choice of pre-made burgers with lean mince and onions to try and make his own instead. Cooking wasn’t his forte, but he figured it couldn’t be too hard to follow a recipe online. He could buy some herb seeds, and chilli plants, and tomato vines, grow them in pots on the table outside. He could get some pots filled with soil, throw some garlic and onions in there too.

The image that had passed through his head before, of himself and Mike eating and laughing and kissing rounded through his mind again, just as cruelly as the last time.

After dinner, Harvey decided that enough was enough. It was time to at least try to take his mind off of Mike, and the first thing he could think of doing that which didn’t involve calling Tanner to play another round of Super Smash Bros—the bastard beat him every fucking time—was hit up a bar and try to pick someone up.

It wasn’t hard to find someone to take the edge off.

She was younger than him. Maybe a little younger than Mike too, and really pretty. There was no connection there, though; no movie references, no quick quips, no puns that could either make him die laughing or die cringing. She wasn’t dull, just different in her humour, and just not what he really wanted at the end of the day. Nevertheless, she had been consenting and enthusiastic, and sex with her had taken his mind elsewhere for a while. She left afterwards without leaving her number.

When he’d fantasised about Mike, about taking him, making love to him in the darkness with ecstatic smiles on their faces, he’d felt so much guilt. But sex with a random stranger, a person he would never see again and whose pretty face he already could barely remember, made him feel just as bad—worse, even—as if he had cheated on his feelings for Mike. Harvey turned on his side, buried his face into his pillow with a groan. ‘Why?’

Nobody answered, but for a moment he imagined someone, maybe Jessica, had heard him, fully prepared to slap him upside the head.

Upon waking, he changed the sheets, cracked the windows open to let fresh air circulate. Somehow he felt cloudier in a way that had nothing to do with the single cocktail he’d ordered for himself the night before. The used condom went into the trash, himself into the shower but even then, he got out feeling even dirtier than when he’d stepped in.

Mike was due to arrive in two days. With arranging all of the details for moving, and selling the house, the month that Mike had gone back for had turned into almost three, but finally things seemed to be on the move. The neglected car Mike had abandoned using after Rachel’s crash had been sold on. The house had been signed over to a couple and their two daughters, ready for a new start in a new city. His boxes finally made an appearance that morning, along with a note taped to the top of one of them urging him to tell Mike when they’d arrived.

As soon as the boxes were safely inside, Harvey Facetimed Mike. ‘Your boxes arrived. And they’re all heavy. You may not have a lot of stuff, but it could sink a navy ship.’

On the other end, Mike rolled his eyes. _‘There should be a smaller one with a big green “X” on the side. Is it there?’_

Harvey leaned, spotting it on top of one of the much larger ones marked Photo Albums/Books. ‘Yeah, it’s here.’

_‘Open that one yourself now. It’s a little thank-you.’_

Harvey retrieved the box and tugged at the tape holding the lid on. ‘So did you use an entire roll of packing tape to seal this one?’

_‘No, just half.’_

‘Honestly can’t tell if you’re kidding right now.’ It took attacking the tape with his keys, but eventually the lid came off. Underneath, nested in even crinkles of paper and confetti sat a bottle of Macallan 18 with a copy of Mario Kart scotch-taped to the side, and another larger box with the words Fujifilm emblazoned across it. ‘…You got me scotch, Mario Kart, and a…camera that costs how much exactly?‘

_‘Before you ask, it’s not as much as you think. It’s not my M2 or M10-P, but still pretty damn cool.’_

‘I don’t even know what half of those words meant. And easy for you to say—you’re an enthusia—‘ Harvey popped the inner box open, unveiling the camera and the lens. ‘Mike, this camera comes in parts. What gives?’

Mike facepalmed, obviously smothering the urge to laugh. _‘It’s kind of a gift that keeps giving. You have a beautiful house and all this free time now, so I was thinking when I get to New York, I could give you a few photography lessons and we could go out shooting together, make some memories.’_

‘You know I’m not going to be as good as you.’

_‘I know. But I also know you’re an old dog who can learn new tricks occasionally. And everyone needs a little bit of art in their lives.’_

‘Less of the old, Michael.’ Harvey put the lens onto the front of the camera, passing the metal and plastic and glass construction from hand to hand. ‘I’ll see if I can practice a little before you get here, save you some time on the whole teaching front.’

_‘Okay. Just remember to keep your horizon straight and you should be fine.’_ There was a pause before Mike spoke up. _‘I miss you, Harvey.’_

‘…I miss you too.’ He should have been thrilled. Instead, as the call ended, the guilty feeling returned full force.


	11. Chapter 11

The freshly cut key was ready and waiting. Mike’s flight wouldn’t get in for another few hours, but the restless feeling had been too much to bear much longer, and he’d caved and gone out early before the morning rush.

The camera Mike had gifted went with him. The glass and metal construction between his hands felt foreign, heavier than he’d anticipated as he lifted the viewfinder up to his eye. At very least, he was grateful for the autofocus; the one time he stopped to try and manually focus, he’d almost had a cyclist ram straight into the back of him in the middle of the sidewalk. How Mike handled it, he had no idea.

He stopped at a tiny coffee shop, ordering a latte and skimming through what he’d taken. Only a couple dozen shots, and nothing jumped out as spectacular; there had been a kid climbing over the railings of some steps, a bird that had stopped with a full bag of potato chips jammed in its beak. Vaguely interesting, but forgettable. As he sipped his latte, he thought about some of the shots Mike had shown him through the years, candids of people they didn’t know, political and social commentaries, some which were simply love letters to the city they lived in. The ones of Mike’s grandmother sprang forth, of her laughing, playing Bridge, beating Mike at poker despite his ability to count cards, precious analogue memories immortalised by electronics.

The concept he could use the skill to keep memories of his own appealed, especially if it meant he got to spend more time with Mike.

The waitress came back up to his table, poking her head over his shoulder. ‘Pretty pictures. Refill?’

‘Thanks. Do you do pastries?’

‘What were you thinking of? We do croissants, pain au chocolat, Danishes, and we do some cinnamon and apple strudels to-go. All fresh-made in house by yours truly.’

Harvey smiled. ‘I’ll take two strudels, and a refill to go?’

The waitress feigned a pout. ‘Aw, and here’s me thinking I’d get eye candy for a little longer. You getting the pastries for anyone special?’

‘Just a friend.’

Maybe it was something in his voice, but the waitress raised an eyebrow. ‘Just a friend?’

He chuckled. ‘…Okay, maybe I wish it was a little more.’

The waitress wandered off, bringing back his order and a cloth to wipe the table down. ‘Well, whoever it is, they’ll be lucky to have a handsome devil like you.’

Harvey got back to the house an hour later. The box of pastries lay in wait on the table. The take-out cup went in the trash, although a couple of minutes later he went back and fished it out, throwing each section into a separate recycling container then ordering himself a few stainless steel ones; he’d seen one that looked like this at Mike’s, covered in a seventies hippy-style flowers. Rachel’s. Harvey wondered afterwards whether Mike had kept that in one of the boxes he’d brought along.

It felt like it took forever for Mike to arrive. An hour or so was lost to Mario Kart (and losing against the NPCs), another to falling down cliffs and mountains in Breath of the Wild, but it still felt like forever before Mike finally knocked at the door, shoving himself harshly into Harvey’s embrace with the force of someone twice his size and strength.

Harvey staggered, regained his footing, gripped back. ‘I take it you missed me?’

‘You, the new house, New York. I missed all of it.’ The hug tightened. ‘God the flight sucked.’

Harvey laughed. ‘They usually do. What happened?’

‘Kid kicking the back of my seat. The guy next to me taking up more elbow room than is considered polite, and kept shoving me to get to the bathroom because, and I quote, “Flights give me the runs”. And then my case was on a flight that came in half an hour later, and it was cracked down the side because the TSA couldn’t see the TSA-specific lock to take a look inside it next to the combination lock. I’m just glad little Tony Stark got here intact.’ Mike sighed into his shoulder, still not letting go. ‘I just want to sleep, eat junk and drink beer, and forget the world outside even exists.’

‘I have pastries, coffee, and an opportunity to kick my ass at Mario Kart.’

Mike chuckled, letting go. ‘That sounds good too.’

Mike’s first night as a (semi-)permanent resident of his home went exactly how he expected it to. Mike found the energy at some point to lift the X-T3 off the coffee table and skim through his photos, nodding at a few. ‘You’re better than you think you are. What was going through your head with the picture of the kid on the railings?’

‘Not a lot.’ Harvey cracked the lid off another beer, handed it over. ‘The kid was smiling, and he looked like he was having fun.’

‘Good composition. What about the pigeon with the potato chips?’

‘I was hungry. Why?’

Mike flicked the power lever, put the camera back down. ‘It almost read like a little social commentary on the homeless population and capitalism. We see them as vermin, who steal and scavenge for whatever they can when sometimes there’s no choice. Kind of like how the bird stole the bag off the side of the street, or out of someone’s hands. It’s little things that make a photo more than just the press of a button.’

‘What about the fact I haven’t taken it off auto the entire time?’ Harvey quizzed with a smirk.

Mike shrugged. ‘You got the shot. That’s the part that counts. In a world where we have autofocus, some people put too much stock in manual mode, where you might fumble and miss the moment. It’s the same people who don’t like it when people edit their images, or layer exposures—‘

Harvey held up a hand. ‘I’m gonna stop you right there. I understood all of those words as separate entities, but not as a collective.’

‘You’ll learn.’ Mike grinned, looked down, sipped his beer. ‘I won’t stop until we’re running rings around each other. Spiralling into madness. An endless loop.’

‘Speaking of circles, or spheres, Jigglypuff isn’t going to get the crap kicked out of it if you don’t pick up your damn controller.’

‘Oh don’t you be talking shit about Jigglypuff, Ganondork.’

‘Oh and your back-up main, Incineroar? More like Incinefloored. Chrom is gonna cut that cat the fuck down.’

‘Yeah, yeah…just wait until you see how good I am with Samus against your little man-crush Chrom.’

The shit-talking continued throughout. Harvey beat Mike twice before being thrashed four times in a row. Then as the sunlight began to disappear, Harvey drew the curtains and got homemade burgers he’d prepped last night out of the refrigerator. ‘I think you’ll like them—I shoved some gochujang paste in there for heat and flavour.’

‘Kimchi for topping?’

‘What do you take me for? Box at the top of the fridge.’

‘You make it?’

‘God no. I have two Korean neighbours. If Go-Eun invites you in for coffee, don’t say yes. She did it to me and I left with two tubs of homemade kimchi, a huge jar of pitaya preserve, and I’m pretty sure she wanted to try and pair me off with her widowed grandma.’

Mike snorted, reaching for the fridge door. ‘Was she at least a cute old lady?’

‘She’s seventy-four, Mike. And while Mrs Yoon Senior definitely looks great, and is very spry for a lady of her age, I’m not someone who generally dates someone that much older than me. Or someone who grabs my ass that hard without prior permission.’

‘Ah, so I can scratch “Old, Sexual-Harassment-Loving South Korean Grandmas” off my list of potential future blind dates for you.’

There was the sting again. ‘If you could. Anyway, Go-Eun’s a sweetheart, so if you ever need anything, just go two doors down on the left. And wear butt padding.’

‘Noted—oh god this is amazing—‘ Mike cut himself off, stuffing another piece of shredded fermented cabbage between his lips with an indecent moan.

Harvey gulped quietly, said nothing as he fried the burgers off. The sound of Mike’s moan was not unlike the one he had fantasised about that night, the one that had weaved in and out of his masturbatory fantasy as the solid phantom of Mike had ridden him with abandon in his mind. He swallowed thickly again, distracting himself with wasabi mayo and crispy-fried, soy-dressed renkon chips. The burger recipe had come from a class he’d taken in a local Asian fusion restaurant; one skinny, commanding half-Japanese-half-Korean chef teaching a bunch of eighteen-to-twenty-five-year-olds (who had swooned at his every word because he looked like some K-pop boy-band member) how to incorporate flavours from his home countries into their own food. He and one older person there had been the only ones above twenty-five, and he’d had to ask the chef to come back to his counter twice because he couldn’t hear him speaking over the giggles and squeals.

That day, he’d learned the recipes for the burger and renkon chips, a miso-dressed eggplant dish that he’d had four times since, and a particularly delicious feat of food gastronomy in the way of little strawberry-flavoured pearls of ‘caviar’ with sweetened onigiri, and discovered that teenage K-pop fans loved to fetishise pretty men.

The strawberry pearls could wait for another day; Mike seemed perfectly contented to drool and moan inelegantly over the flavours of the burger in his hands.

That night, Mike slept soundly in the next room. Harvey barely slept at all.


	12. Chapter 12

A week passed in a blink.

With the house done, Harvey had moved on, suddenly desperate to finish the tiny courtyard-slash-garden. The brickwork barbecue ended up taking no time at all, the last parts of it coming together in one afternoon with only the wet cement between the bricks holding him back from hosting a cookout.

Mike avoided the brickwork, the area too cramped for them both to work there. Instead he planted seeds, repotted herbs into troughs to put on the outside window sills, pinned the winding tomato vines up onto a slim trellises to keep them from snapping under the weight of the tomatoes that were already showing signs of wanting to pop out. One that was already ripe fell into Mike’s hand as he moved it away from the plant, and he grabbed a knife from inside and sliced it in half. ‘You want some?’

‘It’s a cherry tomato, Mike. It’s tiny, you have it.’

‘Doesn’t mean we can’t share. It’s the little things, right?’

The little things indeed. Harvey eyed the shining red halves of the cherry tomato in Mike’s outstretched palm, then picked the smaller half.

Mike shoved his hand out more insistently. ‘Take the big half.’

‘What are you, Miss Honey’s dad? You take it. You’re the one replanting them.’

‘I’ll take being Magnus over the Trunchbull. You sure?’

Harvey reached, curled Mike’s fingers up and pushing his hand. ‘Eat the bigger half, Michael. I’m not quibbling over half of a tomato.’

When everything he had so far was replanted, Harvey sat down on the ground next to the back door, skimming through his phone. Tanner messaged a few hours ago, something about asking to ‘double-date’ with him and Mike sometime, and a few notifications from his emails about his Amazon orders finally being dispatched. He wasn’t interested in either, though; he wanted to know movie times.

Mike reappeared from washing his hands, carrying his cat in one arm. ‘We’re gonna have to get you a catnip plant, Iron-Cat. What do you say, Harvey?’

He grinned, reaching a hand to stroke the young cat’s swishing tail. ‘So not only do we imbibe in the Devil’s Lettuce, but we’re also getting Tony Stark stoned too?’

‘Hey, a cat’s gotta have fun too.’ They watched the cat sniff around the plants for a while, rubbing its little body against the pots. The idea that the house really was a home now with Mike and the kitten in it crossed Harvey’s mind, slapping him in the face.

The garden was small enough to be finished that day, with evening spent sitting on rough garden chairs watching the nothingness go past and the light of the sunset disappear above. The fabric of the seats was faded already, torn and skewered in places where it had caught on errant wicker splinters and fought against the friction above. The outdoor ‘suite’ had been second-hand, third-hand, maybe even fourth, bought from a couple of college dropouts making Youtube videos in their apartment in the hopes of making it big one day as if they had no idea that the market was already oversaturated. It wouldn’t have surprised Harvey if that was the truth; when he had gone to pick them up, the inhabitants were sat back on their (slightly newer) couch, sharing a joint.

The resulting rush of nostalgia for old times had him hankering. ‘I’ll pay you extra if you throw in two of whatever you have there.’

The woman snickered, eyes unfocused and bloodshot and voice low from the effort to keep in the intoxicating smoke. ‘You don’t look like the type, old man.’

‘Never been one to let appearances define me.’ That was a lie, but they didn’t need to know that.

‘Give us an extra twenty bucks, and we’ll throw in a joint.’

‘I’ll give you thirty if you give me two.’

The woman really was half-gone. ‘Done.’

The walls were high. Nobody would see or care. Even if they did, Harvey didn’t; he’d already been disbarred. He pulled them out of his pocket, wiggling one in front of Mike with a cheap clear plastic lighter.

For a second, Mike’s eyes went comically wide, and then he grinned. ‘Where’s the Gatorade and nachos?’

‘No office to piss in, no Gatorade. But there’s a bag of tortilla chips in the cupboard above the sink.’

‘Best landlord ever.’ Mike flicked the lighter, breathed in. ‘Best…’

The woman who had sold it really must have been stoned when she’d sold the joints so cheap; whatever had been encapsulated in the rolling paper was _strong_ and when the high hit, it knocked his brain out of the park.

His head lolled, blinking slowly at Mike in the smoky haze. ‘Man, I can’t believe they let these go for thirty bucks.’

‘Dude, you robbed them…’ Mike giggled, coughing out the smoke he’d just inhaled. ‘This is like a…’

‘Giant marshmallows.’ He didn’t even acknowledge the erroneously-uttered ‘dude’.

‘We should make s’mores. We should go get marshmallows and make s’mores. My grammy used to make ‘em when I did good on tests.’

‘You aren’t having tests?’

‘No but they taste good without having to taste tests first.’

‘Take tests?’

‘Take tects.’

‘Take tests.’

‘I don’t wanna. I’m not in school anymore.’

Harvey spluttered on the next drag, descended into wheezing and hacking as he choked on laughter and smoke. He wasn’t sure if Mike knew exactly what they were laughing about, but Mike joined him, cackling and rolling about in the worn outdoor seat like he hadn’t seen in a long time, honest, unfettered sounds he hadn’t heard in a long time melodious. His favourite song. The idea sounded funny in his head, brought up images of Mike with music notes for arms, and he laughed even harder.

The giggles died down, and Mike shifted, swapping from his own seat over to his. Their knees brushed. ‘Do you know one of the things I’ve missed the most about Rachel?’

The buzz was already wearing off. ‘What’s that?’

‘I miss hugs. I miss having someone who I can just sit there on a couch with and hug.’

He was going to regret it later, Harvey was sure of that. Gripping the remaining part of his joint between his teeth, he lifted one arm, outstretched it towards Mike. ‘You wanna hug now?’

Mike didn’t even answer. Immediately he curled close, resting his head on his shoulder and wrapping his free arm around Harvey’s back and waist. In turn, Harvey curled his arm around Mike’s shoulders, relishing the contented sigh that escaped Mike and seemingly took the tension in his upper body with it. They stayed like that for a while, in an embrace that seemed to take all the chill out of the latening evening. The pot haze ebbed and flowed, grew a little after taking the final drag on his joint, and he faintly noted that Mike’s own had already burned down, extinguished itself.

The hug burned itself into Harvey’s memory, the thirty dollars spent suddenly worth every cent.


	13. Chapter 13

Harvey hadn’t expected to, but he was really becoming attached to Tony Stark.

‘Iron Cat’, as he was sometimes known, had grown a little since he and Mike had arrived, his little belly expanding as he accommodated the multiple treats both Harvey and Mike had been giving him each day. The length of his body went the same way, stretching out like a Slinky, and as Harvey picked him up, just two months after they had first moved into his house, he realised just how much little Tony had changed in such a short while.

A sudden pang, a fatherly affection struck Harvey. His imagination taunted, conjuring Mike sat on the couch, bottle-feeding a baby in his arms, the cat curled up at the side of his lap, or nudging his velvety head against Mike’s cheek begging for kisses. Mike asking if he could take the baby for a minute, kissing him as he wandered past and fading into nothingness as Harvey came back to the room. He looked down into his own arms, seeing the cat there once more. He cradled Tony, kissed the fuzz on one of his smooth ears before placing him back down where he had been in the chair.

His time for being energetic enough to keep up with a young child felt like it was slipping, ticking away. The vague idea that he felt like it was his own version of the menopause—minus some of the less desirable symptoms—made him shake his head and snort. No ovaries, but damn it, if he didn’t feel broody.

Rachel had been gone for just over six months. Although Mike’s tears seemed to have dried up, it didn’t stop him having moments of silence, periods of darkness under his eyes and a furrowed brow when something reminded him of her. Even Harvey missed her; she’d been more than a pretty face, full of ambition, empathy, fire. She might have had the person he was in love with, and they might not have been that close, but they’d shared that worry when Mike had been in prison, understood how much Mike had meant to both of them even if she hadn’t known how Harvey had felt.

With Mike out collecting groceries—and probably getting as much junk food as he could get his hands on—Harvey’s eyes wandered to the camera that sat on the fireplace, the gift Mike had given him. It seemed a waste not to use it wherever possible, even if most of the shots he’d taken up until then had been of the cat stretching, baring a bare hint of pearly canine (feline?) teeth as he’d flopped upside-down and begged for belly tickles, rubbing himself against every rough corner he could find as if every surface was a potential massage. There was one abstract close-up he’d taken with one of Mike’s macro lens filters—Mike had yet to let him loose with his fancy dedicated-to-purpose lens yet—of Tony’s extended whiskers bristling like he was after prey that he liked, and that was the one that greeted him as he turned the camera on.

The first place he headed was to a local park. It was the middle of the day, and as the kids were back in school after the lengthy summer holidays, the only people around were parents and carers with children too young for kindergarten, a few old couples going for their daily walks and younger people running down the pathways. He snapped a few photos of two of them as they ran past, one of them waving at the camera like she was a competitor finishing a marathon, and a few as they stopped to greet a person walking their dog. It was sunny, everything dramatic and bright with ultra-dark shadows, and as he skimmed through the shots, he wondered what Mike would make of them.

When he’d done one circuit of the park, he stopped on a bench facing the swings. A little kid was lifting themself back up, pushing voluminous dark curly hair out of their eyes with a grin. ‘I did a roly, daddy!’

‘Yeah you did, sweetheart. You did a roly-poly. You’re gonna be a little gymnast, aren’t you?’ Their dad lifted them up onto his shoulders. Suddenly Harvey’s stomach lurched, the smile falling off his face. Was he never going to have that? A little boy, a little girl, a person, who looked up to him, loved him, and who he could look up to and love?

Mike was back home when Harvey got back. The fridge was stocked, the cupboards suddenly full of cereal and cookies and Pop-Tarts and various other junk food as if he was a college student all over again. The concept that he was living with his best friend, and they had no responsibilities and spent most of their time relaxing and chilling out together was rather novel; in college he had worried about his grades, desperate to please Jessica and become a lawyer, and each party, each outing instead of staying in and studying, had given him cause for guilt.

There was no reason to feel guilty about enjoying the time he had anymore. Hell, if anything, at his age, if he wasn’t making the most of it, he may as well drop dead already. Somehow unintentional early retirement was better than college, as long as he didn’t take into account the inappropriate being-in-love-with-your-best-friend part.

When he walked into the living room, he found Mike slamming his laptop closed. Harvey smirked. ‘Were you watching porn in the middle of the day?’

‘No.’ The look on his face, of guilt and panic, said otherwise.

‘Come on, was it girl-on-girl? Threesome? Did it involve bondage?’

‘It wasn’t porn.’

‘Come on, Mike. We’re both adults.’

Mike’s eyebrows knitted together, and after a few moments, he sighed and relented. ‘Okay, it’s not porn. It’s…I…kind of occasionally indulge in a little light writing.’

‘Oh my god, you were writing fanfiction, weren’t you?’

Mike’s cheeks turned a furious shade of scarlet. ‘Look, it’s actually a creative hobby, and I got into it last year when this show I was watching didn’t end how I hoped it would. I started writing my own version of the end because I got pissed off with it, and—‘ he sighed in defeat— ‘I got drawn in like Terry Jeffords to the nearest yoghurt.’

Harvey set his camera down on the coffee table, shrugging off his coat before sitting down next to Mike on the couch. ‘Is it something you’re okay with me reading?’

‘…You want to read my fanfiction?’

‘I may not look like it, but I did a creative writing class once. My professor spent ninety-percent of the time talking about the really, really bad ones. I’m not unfamiliar with it, especially if you specialise in “My Immortal” levels of bad.’

Mike chuckled, still red-faced as he opened the laptop back up. ‘Okay, maybe I’m not quite that bad, but I’m not exactly a big-name fan or a popular writer either. Be gentle with me.’

The story wasn’t bad. Quite the contrary. Harvey only knew the show by the ads he’d seen for it, brief clips he’d caught while channel-surfing or scouring Youtube for game tutorials, but as he read through what he imagined was the fledgeling draft of an in-progress story, he was already sucked under, interest in watching the canon material and reading more of Mike’s writing increasing with each paragraph. Mike’s writing was a little amateurish, his descriptions sometimes a little too sparse and too comprehensive in other areas, but even so, Harvey wanted more.

And then he came to a paragraph that stole all breath out of him.

He knew the two characters from ads, knew who they were by face and name, and as he read the moment of their first kiss, he could see it in his own mind playing out exactly as in the scene. His brain superimposed himself and Mike onto the roles, and it took a moment to realise just why it had been so easy to morph them over the two characters on screen. Mike’s chosen pairing—his evident favourite pairing going by the word-count on the entire project—was two men.

Mike chewed his lip. ‘What do you think?’

Harvey finished the draft chapter, passing the laptop back with shaky hands. ‘Now? I really want to watch the show just so I can fully understand all the reasons you want to fix the ending. And then read this to watch you fix it.’

Still pink-cheeked, Mike’s smile reappeared. ‘Thanks. I just think they kind of ruined the opportunity of a lifetime by not ending with these two as a couple. They basically had them as close as a couple the entire time, and it’s like they chickened out of making them the big romance story at the very end and had one of them get with the main girl.’ Mike shrugged, chewing his lip. ‘…As someone who isn’t completely…str-aight, it felt a little bit like a cop-out.’

‘What did you say?’

Harvey had heard exactly what Mike had said. It was just after all that time, after watching Mike marry Rachel and disappear off to his new life with her so long ago, spending years watching them dance around each other, date other people, have their little dramas and big blowouts before they’d made it through the other side together, he didn’t—couldn’t—quite believe what he was hearing.

His words had come out harsh-edged, maybe too aggressively. Mike shrank back, looking down at the closed lid of his laptop. ‘I never told you because I didn’t want to make you uncomfortable, and you seemed really uncomfortable when Louis just wanted to be really close as friends, so I didn’t want to push it.’

‘That was Louis. I didn’t want to be close to Louis because…’ Harvey gestured to the air, ‘Louis Litt. Mike, you could have told me. The only difference it would have made was that, ah…I would have told you the same thing.’

‘The s—’ And realisation struck. ‘You too?’

‘Wow, we really were an LGBTQ firm. Katrina’s ace, you and me are bi. Pretty sure Jessica was at least a little aromantic, and who knows what Louis is.’

Mike snorted. ‘And here’s me thinking you had no idea what ace even meant.’

They snickered together for a few moments, and then Harvey had a thought. A question. ‘Did you ever tell Rachel?’

Mike’s joviality disappeared, back to gnawing his lip again. ‘There never seemed like a good time to. I was with her. She didn’t need to know anyway. Not like I was going to be…dating anyone else.’ The end of the sentence was quiet, defeated.

Harvey wished he’d never asked. He shoved an arm against the back of the couch, drawing Mike into a hug. The position was awkward, but that didn’t matter; Mike leaned in anyway, tucking his head into the space between Harvey’s chin and chest. Since the night sharing the pot, since the first real, longer-than-a-few-seconds cuddle that he and Mike had given each other, Mike had been a lot more physically affectionate with everyone. He’d even hugged Go-Eun and her grandmother when they had taken around an experimental batch of homemade kimchi (red cabbage instead of napa cabbage, and extra-spicy with a touch of smoky chipotle powder mixed in with the gochugaru) and had stayed pleasantly close even when his and Mike’s legs had been squashed together on the small, floral-flecked couch.

They sat there for a while. The minutes ticked past, turning into a full quarter-hour before Mike finally continued. ‘I wanted to tell her once. She was saying something about how she had this “weird” crush on Tom Hiddleston as Loki after we’d watched Thor: Ragnarok, and I almost told her “Get in line, bitch”.’

‘Huh. In the very short while I’ve known you’re bi, I automatically pegged you more as a Killmonger man.’

‘Oh, don’t get me wrong, Michael B. Jordan is gorgeous. But there’s something about that hair-flip Loki does that makes want to drop everything and play that scene on repeat until my eyes bleed.’ Mike curled closer. ‘I guess on some level I was scared she’d think I was going to leave her for a man. Or that I’d had some late-life bisexual awakening and I was cheating on her with a guy. I didn’t want to worry her. She was already worried enough, especially when we started trying.’

There was a small part of Harvey—the worse part that still wanted to play the man—that wanted to believe, to convince Mike, Rachel wouldn’t have taken the news of his bisexuality well. Instantaneously his conscience overruled; he couldn’t even sully her memory for himself, let alone Mike. And he loved Mike too much, too wholly to manipulate him like that.

He squeezed Mike’s shoulders, and told the truth. ‘I think, as much as Rachel trusted you, she might have worried a little, but I don’t think it would have been out of not trusting you. It’s just that worry I imagine every spouse probably gets. It’s about losing the person you love, whatever takes them away. I’ll bet that if she was alive now, she wouldn’t care whether you were attracted to other genders. She’d just continue to love you like she always did.’

The truth that hurt so much seemed to be what Mike needed to hear. He nodded underneath his chin, hugging him back like he had on the garden seats all those weeks ago and humming contentedly. The sound, reminiscent of the cat’s, rumbled through Harvey’s aching chest. ‘Thank you. For everything.’

When Mike finally moved out of his embrace to go take a shower, Harvey stayed on the couch with his head in his hands, silently begging to anyone, anything, whatever was out there to make the feelings go away.


	14. Chapter 14

Harvey had known tonight was a bad idea. And he’d done it anyway. And now, he was ready to backhand Travis around the face, even if he had only been trying to help.

On the eight-month anniversary of Rachel’s accident, Mike had gone out by himself, taking his camera with him, and Travis had turned up at the door an hour later, carrying two take-out cups and wearing the look of a man with a plan. ‘Walk with me, Harvey.’

So he did. They circled the block once. Twice. When it looked like they were going to do a third circuit, Harvey turned to Travis and waved his hand. ‘Any reason you asked me to wander around the neighbourhood and drink coffee? Shouldn’t you be at work?’

‘I’m on a break. Meeting a client near here in an hour, and thought I would proposition you.’

‘You’re not getting in my pants, Tanner. I don’t care what your wife says you can do in your own time,’ Harvey snorted.

‘Not for me, molecule-mind. Someone other than your widowed best friend to focus on. There’s this guy at my office who saw a photo of you from when you last came around to ours for dinner and asked about you.’ Travis held out his phone, tapping on one photo before handing it to him. ‘His name is Mitch. He has a daughter, about twelve, who plays saxophone in her school’s jazz appreciation club.’

Harvey slowed, looking at the photo. For someone who was trying to distract him from the inappropriate romantic feelings for his best friend, Tanner couldn’t have picked a worse candidate. Blond. Blue eyes. Around Mike’s height, even had a similar nose and jaw. Even the name shared a few letters. If Harvey hadn’t have known better, he would have thought this man could have been Mike’s older brother. ‘I dunno.’

Tanner rolled his eyes. ‘Are you shitting me, Harvey? If I wasn’t straight, I’d be asking the guy out.’

‘Are you sure?’

‘Have you seen him?’

‘I mean are you sure you’re straight? You sure are singing this guy’s praises for a happily married straight man.’

Another eye-roll. ‘You’re an expert in deflecting. I’m speaking objectively here. What’s wrong with Mitch?’

‘For starters, what makes you think I’m not happy just how I am?’

‘Because you’re living in a house with the man you’re in love with, and couldn’t do a goddamn thing anyway because he’s a straight widower who lost his wife within the last year?’

Harvey pursed his lips. If only Tanner knew just which part of that sentence was incorrect. ‘Okay, point taken. But what makes you think Mitch is a good match for me?’

‘Jazz enthusiast, attractive, not opposed to dating someone disbarred…also when I showed him more photos of you, he was practically drooling. The guy is actually into you, which is more than I can say for the current object of your affections. At very least, what do you think of him physically?’

He sighed, taking another look. ‘He’s…attractive enough. What sort of date would he be expecting? Is it dinner and back to a hotel room, or coffee and a walk in the park?’

‘Well, pretty sure he wouldn’t say no to the hotel room. But I don’t think he cares. He just thinks you’re really handsome and he wanted to know more about you.’

He’d relented and said yes, setting up a date for two nights away. And now he was stuck on a date with a guy who, for all of the things that Travis said that they had in common, was shockingly hard to talk to. The guy was giving him nothing. Something in him had expected Mitch to be as easy to talk to as Mike, but instead of the expected flood of movie quotes and shared references, Harvey found himself sat opposite a man who looked somewhat like Mike, but with about half of the personality. A knock-off Mike, like whoever had decided to clone him hadn’t quite had the budget to do it right and had marketed him as an inexpensive alternative with only half of the features that made the original so desirable. Even small talk, simple things like asking about work, or what he liked to do in his spare time, seemed to be hard to get out of him.

‘What sort of stuff do you listen to besides jazz?’

Mitch shrugged, poking a piece of steak onto a fork tine. ‘Not much really. I don’t really like much but jazz.’

‘No rock, metal? No secret love of radio-popular stuff?’

Another shrug. ‘Nope. Jazz is just about it. What about you?’

‘Well, recently I was getting into Nordic Viking music and—’ At the unsolicited eyebrow raise, Harvey raised his own— ‘what?’

‘Just…Viking music?’

‘Yeah. I tend to listen to a lot of stuff that’s a little “out there”.’

‘Why?’

He was just about ready to walk out. ‘It’s good. And you can hear a lot of influences from traditional music in modern interpretations. It really broadens your whole listening horizons when you branch out even a little.’

‘I’m just happy with jazz. My daughter plays the sax—did I tell you—‘

‘Yeah, you said that...’ It took every ounce of self-restraint to not roll his eyes. Yeah, the guy was proud of his daughter, but his entire personality consisted of his daughter, and jazz music.

He was going to KILL Tanner with his bare hands for getting him into this goddamn mess.

When Harvey finally had the chance to escape—he’d made some definitely lame excuse about forgetting an early doctor’s appointment—Mike was still up when he got back, Switch controller in hand and swearing profusely at the creatures on-screen. ‘Fuck. You. Ganon’

‘You still on the same part?’

‘No, I got through that one pretty fast…’ Mike trailed off, taking in his frustrated expression. ‘Your date go badly?’

Harvey threw his head back, groaning exaggeratedly. ‘Pretty face. Zero personality. Like one of Jardashians.’

‘Kardashians? Jenners?’

‘Whatever, same difference. He talked about nothing but jazz music and his daughter the entire time. He doesn’t like movies, any other genres of music, video-games, books, sports…’ Harvey sighed. ‘I swear, for a second there, I wish it had been Louis out on the damn date.’

‘Oh that is bad,’ Mike snorted, leaning forward to grab the unopened beer in front of him and crack the lid off. He pressed it into his fingers and patted his hand. Warm hands, cold beer. Harvey wished he hadn’t let go. ‘Did he at least drink a decent scotch?’

‘He was, in his own words, “more of a rum kind of guy”. What the fuck was he, a pirate?’

‘Maybe he was hoping for some cosplay action. The captain and the cabin boy…that could make for a really dirty alternate universe story…remind me of that one later.’

‘Ugh…’ Harvey gulped at his beer, holding out his free hand. ‘I don’t want to think about it. Him. Nuh-uh. Gimme a shot at this one. I need something fun to make up for the shitty evening.’

‘After you’re done losing to Ganon, I’ll show you how it’s done.’

‘You were losing when I got in!’

‘Doesn’t mean it’s not second time lucky!’

‘You’re a child.’

‘Old man.’

‘Brat.’

‘Asshole.’

‘Jerk.’

‘Bitch.’ Mike gesticulated towards the controls. ‘Have at it.’

Harvey unpaused and began the fight. The few minutes of conversation that had passed between them since he’d gotten home had been more exciting than his entire evening out with Mitch. What would he have done if Mike hadn’t been living with him? Would he have played video-games and drank beer? Would he had gone to his bedroom and crashed? Whenever he’d had a bad date as a college boy, he’d gotten back to his apartment, jerked off, and taken a hot shower. That wasn’t really an option with Mike sitting two inches away from him, oblivious to his deep-seated infatuation with him as he threw popcorn between his lips and mumbled bad advice about the boss fight.

Harvey sighed, simultaneously taking one last hit and losing the battle. He chucked the controller back. ‘I think bad dates ruin my gaming ability. How’s the writing going?’

Mike half-smiled, gazing at the closed laptop in one corner of the coffee table. ‘I hit a road block. I know where I want to go with it—’

‘Dirty scene?’

‘Why do you assume I was going the pornographic route?’

‘Uh, pirate AU? Anyway, you told me your online handle. You have no secrets now.’ Harvey wiggled his eyebrows. ‘Also, with regards to the latest one you posted? Never would have had you pegged for a man with a teacher kink.’

Mike’s cheeks went scarlet. ‘What do you mean?’

Harvey pulled his phone out of his pocket, touching the browser icon and bringing up the last page he’d been on. ‘“He never thought that there would be such smooth skin under such a modest white shirt and black tie. He bit his lip, the word “Professor” slipping out unbidden, wanting, almost a moan as the older man lifted him up onto the desk behind him and licked a line from collarbone to jaw.” You have a thing about the whole forbidden dirty immoral romance between teachers and their students, don’t you?’

‘It was a college alternative universe! I was—it—I just—’ Mike spluttered, cheeks going even darker.

Harvey smirked. ‘It was a good piece of writing. You had me hooked right up to the last word on that one. But boy did it reveal a lot of your kinks.’

‘Ugh…please never tell anyone about this. This never leaves the room. The house. Whatever.’

‘Your kink is safe with me.’

‘It’s not actually a teacher thing, by the way. It’s more of a…glasses thing. If someone I like has to get glasses, or if they wear glasses to do something, they suddenly become like ninety-percent more attractive the second they put them on.’ He looked back to the screen, swapping over to the TV and putting the console controller down on the table. ‘Rachel occasionally wore glasses to read, but after she found out about my little thing for glasses, she started wearing them a LOT more often.’

And there was the block in the road again. Harvey chuckled. ’So you preferred Clark Kent to Superman?’

‘When I watched Buffy the Vampire Slayer, I had a thing for Giles, and Wesley. Glasses, man. It’s a cheat code straight into my sexual fantasies.’

‘What about Louis?’

‘Uh…even glasses can have their limits.’


	15. Chapter 15

The ninth month since Rachel’s death gave birth to different ideas.

At breakfast, still groggy, Harvey sat down to Mike putting a laptop down in front of him and pointing to an icon on the screen. ‘I finished it.’

‘You finished it?’

‘My story. I finished it.’ Mike sank his teeth into a slice of toast, smiling around the bread.

Harvey grinned back. ‘You know I still haven’t started watching this show, right?’

‘I know. That’s why we’re binge-watching it over the weekend while I work on trying to make some money.’

It hadn’t really come up until then. It had been apparent that Mike wouldn’t want to go straight back into working, but he had also become aware that he was growing increasingly restless. It hadn’t been so bad when he’d been helping with the house, or when they’d finished the garden together, (although with it coming up to late November, it was becoming harder and harder to justify sitting out in the cold). When he wasn’t doing something, Mike would pace, wandering up and down until Harvey was sure he was making even the cat a little motion-sick. He would read everything in sight, buy more books and e-books and magazines until his iPad was full and the shelves in his bedroom were overflowing. He’d played through Harvey’s increasingly large collection of video-games, completing little tasks and challenges that even he hadn’t looked at yet. It only made sense that what little time hadn’t been spent doing other things had been behind the screen of his laptop, tapping away at the keys meaningfully.

Harvey sipped his coffee. ‘By new job, do you mean—’

‘I don’t know yet. I mean, I have all this knowledge right here in my head. I’m qualified now. It seems like…after everything we went through…what you went through to get me into the Bar, it would be a waste to not use it. But…I’m not sure anyone will want to hire me as a lawyer these days.’

‘I did always say you could be a law consultant, freelance, online. But I’m guessing you’re getting cabin fever, and you might want something different?’

Mike nodded. ‘I want to have something to get excited about waking up to. Maybe it doesn’t have to be law, though. Do you…’

At the hesitation, Harvey raised his eyebrows. ‘Do I what?’

‘…Do you think I have it in me to be a writer?’

‘You are a writer.’

Mike’s eyes rolled, closed. ‘I don’t mean fanfiction. I mean a book. Something I could actually get published by a company, or market and self-publish myself.’

Some tiny segment, a minuscule bundle of cells in the recesses of his brain screamed at Harvey that he should be absolutely furious. Harvey had lost his license to practice law from the entire process of getting Mike his own qualification. Jessica had lost hers. The firm was essentially in tatters, a shadow of its former glorious, Harvard-graduate exclusive self (although, deep down, Harvey had known that had meant turning down amazing candidates who would have been a lot better than the likes of some of their old associate picks), and Mike wanted to throw that away for some kind of passion project?

Instead, Harvey felt almost cheerful. It made sense, to branch out further to find his way back from Rachel’s death, and at least with something like writing, it had more than just one limited application. The idea Mike could write reviews, critiques, articles crossed his mind. Mike could write fiction based off true stories; from the amount of crime novels littering the living room, and the advantage of his own memory, he had a great knowledge base for weaving a compelling story together. He had it in him.

Harvey raised his mug a little, nodded before taking a slurp. ‘It’s not easy, but I think you could do it. What sort of book were you thinking of writing to start with?’

Mike wrapped his hands around his own coffee cup, shrugging awkwardly. ‘About two weeks ago, I started researching for a story about a person practicing medicine without a medical degree.’

Harvey smirked. ‘I think they’re called Faith Healers.’

Mike snorted into his cup. ‘I know it’s a little on the nose, maybe too close to home. But I have some medical knowledge from reading things back when I was taking exams for other people, and I know a few doctors who could help me get all the details right. I’d obviously need to get an editor, or at least someone to look at the entire thing to tell me if it sounds awful or I’ve made a major screw-up somewhere, but it’s something I feel really enthusiastic about. I know how it’s going to end at the moment too.’

‘That’s good. Not interested in a series, though? No trilogy?’

‘Reading an entire series of books is intimidating. If the story needs more, I’ll make the book longer. I’d rather it wasn’t a ten-books-and-counting series that seems like it won’t ever end.’ Mike sipped again, stroking the cat which had leapt up onto the empty chair between them. ‘I like things to be complete before I read them. That way I always know I’m going to get an ending, even if I don’t like how it ends.’

‘You’re the kind of guy who doesn’t read fanfic works in-progress, aren’t you?’

Mike’s expression softened, became sombre. He stood from the table, taking Tony with him. ‘Some people need closure.’

The concept that Mike was looking for a new profession irked something within him.

That night, Mike retired to his bedroom early, taking his laptop and a notebook he had been scrawling notes in all afternoon with him. It left Harvey alone with his own thoughts, and suddenly he realised just how much he missed having a job. There were little pangs he got on occasion, a pining for the old days when he caught the odd episode of a procedural crime show or a courtroom drama, but something in his head told him that it wasn’t the right place for him anymore. His heart agreed; since being disbarred, his check-ups with the doctor to avoid the same heart attack as his father before him had showed that his blood pressure had pleasantly dropped to better levels, and his resting heart-rate was no longer the elevated, erratic one of an overworked, anxious name partner. Being a lawyer just wasn’t the right thing for him anymore.

He sat down next to the cat, playing absent-mindedly with one of Tony’s back paws as he napped and purred. The TV droned away, white noise buzzing in the empty room, and Harvey flipped from one thing he enjoyed doing to the next. What could his next move be? He could cook now, but somehow the inability to go more than a week or so without stabbing his fingers and thumbs with the pointy end of a knife put a crimp on the idea of working in a kitchen before it really fully developed. In spite of how useful it would be, he had no inclination to learn how to code, and he was a little too long in the tooth (and several years too late to the party) to think about marketing himself as an everyday lets-player online, no matter how well he knew he could charm an audience. The concept he could become Instagram-famous gave him a chuckle; he might have been fairly attractive, especially for a man of his years, but the idea of spending day after day trying to make it look like it was wholly boba tea and yoga sounded even less appealing than flopping his genitals into the mouth of a hungry alligator and letting its jaws snap shut on his crown jewels.

Mike had figured out what his next step was. Harvey had thought his next step was the house, but with it finished, he didn’t really have a good follow-up. Maybe he could steal Mike’s idea; learn to write, write a fiction book. Maybe he could write a kids book. There could never be enough books that could help kids figure out who they are and who they liked, and when he’d been growing up, there had been a severe deficiency of stories about bisexuality and biromanticism, particularly ones that didn’t outright condemn it. That was one idea at least, even if for him it was a stranger one. He could try and practice photography, get just political enough to start taking photos with a social or political commentary to them, although it was an oversaturated market as it was and could have taken years before anyone would have noticed him. Journalism wasn’t really his passion either; it had too much of a tendency to sensationalise the things that didn’t need it, and play down the things that should have been front-page news for his tastes. He’d already sold his soul as a lawyer. He didn’t relish the idea of selling everything else as part of the paparazzi.

Harvey stood, stepping over to the door to the garden and standing out in the cold air. He could already feel winter in the air, the last dregs of summer that autumn had clung to truly gone into hibernation and taking any inclination to use the garden he’d put so much effort into cleaning up along with it. Even so, and somehow even out of season, the plants he had started growing were going strong, flourishing pleasantly and still supplying him with fresh ingredients. The plastic greenhouse he’d bought and put into the small part of the garden that caught the sun every day was full of various plants, the tomato vines still making the effort to pop out the occasional fruit. Smiling, he wiped the dirt off of one of them, dropping it into his mouth and bursting it with his teeth, the satisfaction of knowing that he had cultivated and grown the plant that had produced it filling him with warmth. Looking at the tiny, closed-off patch of patio covered in little herb pots and trays of flowering plants sparked more joy for his efforts than the last few years at the firm—save for Mike finally getting his law degree—had managed to scrape together as a whole.

Maybe the garden was the solution to his problem.


	16. Chapter 16

Despite his Jewish roots, Harvey always threw a ‘Christmas’ party for his friends and colleagues.

That year, his colleagues were non-existent, but at least he had more people he could call real friends those days, and on the twenty-fourth of December, Travis came around with an armful of presents and his wife and kids in tow to celebrate the holiday season.

Harvey stepped around the two kids as they ran for the living room, already fighting over who was getting which coloured controllers for Mario Kart (Annie always claimed the bright green one, and JD subsequently always complained about the pink one), and immediately started chuckling at the wrapping paper around one of the nearest presents. ‘Did you actually wrap Christmas presents in paper covered in dreidels?’

‘There was one that had a menorah motif, but the candles looked a little…phallic.’ Travis’s wife Karina snickered, pecking his cheek and handing him a Tupperware container full of cookies. ‘Food’s kosher though.’

‘Thanks. I see Annie’s doing better.’

Travis nodded, wrapping an arm around Karina. ‘Yeah. I mean, we knew it was appendicitis, routine, but it didn’t stop someone worrying.’

Karina turned, indignant. ‘Uh, excuse me. I’m not the one who started crying the second she went through the doors to the O.R., big baby.’ She turned to Harvey, smirk returning. ‘JD was more composed than he was, and the poor kid had no idea what was going on with her.’

‘I figured as much. When he came around to watch Infinity War last week, he welled up when Peter Parker disintegrated.’

‘That’s better than when we went to watch it at the movie theatre. He all-out bawled like a baby the second he was back in the car.’ At that, both he and Karina laughed, leaving an indignant looking Travis to sulk between them.

Harvey let them settle and poured them all some wine (and grabbed the kids some juice boxes), watching them together through the doorway. The sight of a full house, with Annie and JD darting around, fighting amongst themselves and chasing after Tony the cat, struck that note of longing again. Mike was fully embroiling himself in fun with the kids, putting on funny voices and cracking (surprisingly PG-rated) jokes and claiming he was Iron Man.

Annie laughed loudly. ‘No that’s Tony!’

‘Tony? Tony is Iron Cat!’ At that, Mike scooped up Tony Stark and nuzzled his nose against one of his ears. ‘This is Iron Cat, and he has a fluffy suit.’

‘You’re just setting yourself up for misery, Harvey.’ He hadn’t even noticed Travis had been in the kitchen, almost jumping a foot in the air at his voice so close.

‘You trying to kill me?’

‘Nope. But I think you are. You can’t keep doing this to yourself.’

‘I know.’

‘I’m serious.’

‘I know, Travis, but it’s not like you can just turn these things off and be done with it.’ He turned to the fridge, sighed, distracted himself by pulling more drinks out of it. ‘I know I need to move on. But it’s not gonna be with the guy you set me up with. I have more interests than jazz.’

Travis snickered. ‘Okay, point taken. What about someone a little less obsessed? One of the associates has a stunning sister. Dark curly hair, bright green eyes, coaches Little League for her niece’s team on the weekends.’

Harvey said he’d think about it, but in truth, all he could think was she might look different enough to Mike to distract him from his latest bout of broodiness. Maybe it would work out, and they’d fall in love, and he could get the family he’d been thinking about for months.

Or he’d get a night of meaningless, potentially hot sex with a beautiful woman, and end up feeling like he’d somehow cheated on Mike all the same.

There was no winning in his mind.

By the time Travis, Karina, and the kids left, the cookies had been fully devoured, the presents opened. Harvey suspected that the gift had been influenced by the kids a little; two games he suspected they wanted him to play with them, a pack of personalised playing cards with a set of poker chips (Karina’s choice), and a bottle of scotch (Travis’s doing) had taken up residence on his coffee table. Mike hadn’t done so badly out of the Tanners either; a leather-bound iPad case that looked a lot like a writer’s notebook (it had gone immediately onto his iPad without hesitation), an actual oxblood-coloured faux-leather-bound notebook, and an expensive three-pen set perfect for writing many notes for his future novel endeavers. In return, Harvey had sent the entire family on their way with a plethora of new toys for the kids (he’d foregone buying either of them a drum kit, but it had been a close call), Karina’s favourite wine and homemade holiday snacks, and cufflinks for Travis which had been engraved with the word ‘Douchebag’ on the inner sections, hidden from view but always there (he and Mike, and Travis and Karina had almost lost it laughing when he’d seen the inscription).

Partway through cleaning up the chaos, he caught Mike smiling to himself. ‘You’re in a good mood.’

Mike shrugged, grin still firmly fixed. ‘I just had a really great night. I wasn’t sure I could. It’s the first winter holiday without her. But having Travis and Karina around, and the kids…kind of felt like I was a little kid again myself. Only one who can drink beer, and eggnog, and mulled wine.’

Harvey’s own lip tilted. ‘You are a little kid at heart. You’re gonna be a great dad one day.’

‘I hope so. I’m just still aware…I feel like I should start dating again, but every time I think about it, I feel guilty.’ The smile faded. ‘She’d want me to be happy, move on. But it doesn’t feel right, trying to be happy this quickly.’

Harvey’s father had been in one serious relationship after Lily had cheated, one he’d still been in when he’d died. When the woman who might have become his stepmother had moved on, he remembered the conversation they’d had shortly beforehand. She’d been guilt-ridden, a little sickened at herself of how she had been able to find love again, but desperate to follow what she’d found. He hadn’t been sure how to respond at the time, the unreadiness to deal with the situation causing him to snap unpleasantly at her and drive a wedge between them.

That time, he knew what to say. ‘Mike, it’s been ten months. When it’s right, it might still feel wrong for a little while. And then it will feel right. And then wrong again, maybe. But ultimately, it will be the right thing. There is no way in hell Rachel would have wanted you to be a lonely widower for the rest of your life.’

Mike said nothing. Instead, two arms wrapped themselves around him, pulling him in for a hug that lasted longer than usual. ‘You have no idea how much I needed to hear that.’

There was no point in getting his hopes up. Even so, as Mike squeezed one last time before letting go, they wriggled to life of their own accord anyway. Keen to seek distraction, Harvey broached a different difficult subject. ‘You know how you’ve been writing, and I’ve basically been sitting on my ass trying to grow food and not go stir-crazy because I no longer have a job to go to?’

‘Yeah. You’re pacing a lot. Not sure the wood floor by the window can take much more.’

‘Well, I’m trying to find a new job. Growing plants.’

Mike paused in putting the dishes in the sink, turned to look at him. ‘Like…weed?’

Harvey spluttered, choking on a laugh. ‘No! That’s where your brain went first? Food, herbs, flowers! I thought I could try and get a job working in that little gardening place nine, ten blocks from here.’

‘That’s not exactly going to get you back the luxury lifestyle,’ Mike joked.

‘Never crossed my mind. I think I’m kind of done with the whole high-rise building luxury condo life. I have here, and it feels more like home than anywhere else I’ve ever lived.’

‘Yeah. I like it better too. So…growing plants.’

Harvey snacked some of the leftover snacks in the fridge. ‘It’s rewarding watching something you nurtured grow into something beautiful. Something that takes from you to develop, then gives back.’

‘You sound like you want to raise kids. Or get another fraudulent associate a law degree.’

‘Yeah. One day, maybe. Worried I’m getting too old to keep up with a kid, so it may have to be an associate.’

‘Nah. You’ll just be a hot older dad.’

The effort to sound casual was agonising. ‘Oh, so you think I’m hot now?’

‘You’re pretty good. You’ve still got it.’ Mike winked, grinned, throwing the last of the recycling away. ‘G’night.’

That night, Harvey barely slept at all, Mike’s last words echoing and reverberating through his skull.


	17. Chapter 17

His dreams were a curse.

At six in the morning on Christmas Day, Harvey awoke with a moan, the sound morphing into a groan as he realised what had just transpired. At the second he’d been pulled out of his dream, Mike had been inside him, looming over him with sweat-drenched hair and flushed brow, punctuating each thrust with a heated gasp against his lips. He’d been on the edge, Mike taking him right up to it, and his orgasm hit him right as he’d woken up.

Harvey slapped a hand across his face, grimacing at the slick feeling that had filled his boxers. He wasn’t a sex-crazed teenager anymore. The last time he’d had a really vivid wet dream had been on the good side of twenty-five, young and insatiable. And yet there he lay, past forty-five, underwear sticky, sweat of activities he’d only dreamed of trickling down his forehead and jaw and throat down into the depths of his sleep shirt. _Great, I’m a horny college student all over again, only with worse joints_.

Tiptoeing past Mike’s bedroom door, Harvey showered, changed into clean clothes, brushed his teeth like it was any other morning where he hadn’t woken from a dream of his best friend fucking him senseless. The image kept popping back out at him as he started making something for breakfast, pointedly ignoring the way that the few stray drops of clear albumen in the pan from the two eggs he’d cracked into it looked oddly reminiscent of Mike’s sweat trickling down his body as he shoved them roughly into a soft bread roll. He rearranged the presents around the small tree that sat on the opposite side of the window to his menorah, pulling the ones for Mike forward so they were easier to access. The other had made him promise to not go insane on presents—‘You don’t even really celebrate, why would I expect a gift from you?’—but Harvey had bought him a few things all the same; a couple of rare books he’d been eyeing up, a few packs of photo paper for his Instax, and a print of some Curious George artwork drawn by a young artist online. The last one he knew would be especially appreciated.

He eyed up his own presents, giving one a gentle poke.

‘You’d better not be trying to open your presents yet.’

‘I don’t celebrate it really, so why did you get me anything?’ he shot back, smirking.

Mike rolled his eyes, then yawned. ‘Fair point. Merry Hanukkahmas, Harvey.’

‘Same to you. You wanna open some presents, or do you want breakfast?’

‘What time is it?’

‘’Bout seven-forty-five.’

Mike groaned. ‘Then definitely breakfast. Coffee. Tea. Eggs. All of it.’

Of all the things that Harvey didn’t expect to have to deal with, it was the lack of good TV. ‘Why the hell is Frozen playing on nearly every channel at the same goddamn time?’

‘I know! You’d think it would be the classics, like Home Alone, or Home Alone 2!’

Harvey hit the media button on the remote, shifting over to Netflix. ‘Oh man, I’ll bet Travis and Karina are having a field day with JD and Annie…Frozen is JD’s favourite Disney movie.’

‘A moment of silence for a man and a woman who can’t be with us today…away from the horrors of overplayed Disney songs.’ Mike patted over his heart with one hand and grinned. ‘Gotta say, though, Annie is really starting to develop a voice. I heard her singing upstairs on her way to the bathroom…she’ll be putting Idina Menzel to shame in a few years.’

Harvey skimmed through the movies on-screen, searching for something good. ‘I think Travis has her taking singing lessons. Sounds like they’re paying off—‘

‘That—Love Actually.’

‘Really? I’m more of a Four Weddings And A Funeral man.’ It wasn’t a lie—he did prefer that one—but any romantic movie was automatically the last thing he wanted to watch right then post-inappropriate-pornographic-dream. The idea of watching anything that involved having couples (happy or otherwise) dangled in front of him for two hours while he sat pining through a holiday he didn’t even celebrate didn’t sound like his idea of a good time.

But then Mike threw him the puppy eyes, and he caved.

He wasn’t quite Andrew Lincoln’s character, but he certainly related to the feeling, minus the weird wedding movie made up of Mike’s face and almost nothing else. At least the guy had been able to give in at the end and let go, though. He glanced to Mike, eyes fixated on the TV screen with a small smile, and regretted it immediately; there was no way he was getting over that face anytime soon.

The movie (finally) ended. Mike turned to him, tired head lolling slightly against the cushions of the couch. The smile had gone. ‘Of all the characters I thought I might be like or really relate to on a personal level…never thought it would be Daniel.’

‘When you first started at Pearson Hardman, you were more like Sam. You tried to do lots of things to impress, even when you really didn’t have to.’

‘That, coming from you? You made me fight to get you to say you cared about me.’

‘Care. No past tense bullshit here. Anyway, I’m a different kind of person now, if you hadn’t guessed by then whole celebrating Christmas-Hanukkah with my best friend while he tries to pretend Love Actually is better than Four Weddings.’

‘Different. Never said it was better. Plus it’s Christmas. And Hanukkah. It’s Christmanukkah. Or Hanukkahmas.’

‘Babbling.’

Mike rolled his eyes.

‘Has your first Christmas without Rachel been okay?’ The question slipped out by itself. Harvey could have slapped himself.

Mike nodded, a shade of the former smile returning. ‘A lot better than I thought it would be. Thank you.’

‘You don’t have to thank me.’

‘Yeah, I do. For a lot of shit. Not sure what right now, but I’m thanking you anyway, so goddamn take it. Now, since I picked Love Actually, what are we watching now while I break out the eggnog?’

If they didn’t have a hangover the next morning, it would be nothing short of a miracle. Mike’s eggnog was less eggnog and more just straight-up booze served with a splash of seriously sweet heavy cream. Harvey made his way through the first one slowly, with the second one going down a lot easier, and when he got to the third during the good part of Home Alone, he was almost sure that there were actually two Kevin McCallisters on-screen before them.

Mike giggled at the screen. ‘Oh man, that would totally be what your kid would be like.’

Harvey spluttered indignantly. ‘My kid? You’re the troublemaker. It would definitely be your kid that smashes a paint can into a burgler’s head. Mine would go for the icy steps and the nails.’

‘Can you imagine what it would be like if a kid was half me and half you?’

Harvey’s stomach churned. Suddenly the eggnog was swirling in his stomach, sloshing around with too much food and refusing to mix well with the rest of the contents. He swallowed. ‘A well-dressed delinquent who charms his way out of detention.’

Mike smiled, chuckled. ‘Yeah, probably. But I think we’d do well to keep him in line. Or her. Or them.’

‘Are you talking about gender, or multiple children?’

‘Either. Both.’

Harvey swallowed, excused himself. The second he was up the stairs, he staggered into the bathroom, bringing up everything he’d eaten that evening. His stomach burned, his throat stinging. If eggnog wasn’t enough of a reason to never celebrate Christmas ever again, the cruel image of himself, Mike, and two kids as a happy little family unwrapping presents next to a tree and his menorah cursing his fitful sleep was enough to seal the deal.


	18. Chapter 18

Harvey had expected New Years Eve to be a quiet affair. After what he would describe as the World’s Worst Hangover on Boxing Day—Mike didn’t hesitate to remind him about the time they’d gotten wrecked on vodka back when they’d both still been working at the firm—he really didn’t relish the idea of repeating the experience so soon, or ever again if he had any choice in the matter.

And then Travis came over on the thirtieth of December, holding two invite-only tickets to a fancy black tie event and insisting that they both come along. ‘It’s not going to be that crazy, and even if it did get a little bit crazy, the hotel suite is included in the ticket cost, so you can sneak off to bed early and let everyone else continue to party.’

‘Whose leg did you have to hump to get these?’

‘Your one-time date Mitch handed me these, asked if you’d be coming along.’

‘Yeah, I made it pretty clear I wasn’t interested in being anything more than friends with Mitch. But even that’s a stretch. I’d rather spend four hours listening to Louis talk about his cats than have another session of him talking about his saxophone-playing jazz princess daughter all evening.’

‘Come on, Harvey. You might meet someone nice! And if not, you might still find someone hot to kiss at midnight. There’s plenty of eligible people going, all genders included.’ Travis shot him a persuasive look, waved the tickets.

Harvey grabbed them, right as Mike came through the door holding groceries. ‘Mike, you feel like going to a fancy New Years Eve party tomorrow?’

‘Free champagne?’

‘All you can drink without vomiting, and a hotel room to recover in if you do.’

‘Hotel suite,’ Travis corrected.

‘Sorry, suite. What do you think?’

‘Count me in. I’ll break out my best skinny tie.’

Harvey glared. ‘You wear a skinny tie, I’ll garrotte you with it.’

Mike flashed him a mischievous smile. ‘I’m kidding. I swear, I will have my bow tie ready and waiting for you to correct.’

So the next evening, each carrying a small overnight bag, Harvey bundled them into the limousine Travis had sent their way—‘Arrive in style,’ he’d said—and relaxed until it stopped in front of the doors to the hotel where the event was hosted. True to his word, Mike’s attempt to tie his own bowtie was disastrous, and trying to ignore the proximity of his hands to Mike’s neck (just the right height to guide their mouths together) Harvey fixed it for him a few minutes before they arrived. The suite they were sharing was a stone’s throw away from the one that housed Travis, Karina, and the kids, and it was there that they gathered to have a pre-party drink and snacks.

Annie and JD were adorable in their new outfits; both had little tuxedo jackets, JD’s hanging over a pair of matching trousers while Annie’s projected outwards with the curve of her tulle-layered skirts. The flat red shoes were twinned with Karina’s heels, clicking the heels together like Dorothy as she flicked her fingers against the new console between her hands. ‘Dad said that we could bring them along because there’s going to be other kids playing videogames too.’ JD nodded next to her, face screwing up in concentration while he played on his own screen.

Mike nudged a glass of scotch into his hands. Single measure. He clearly remembered the hangover too. ‘Is it sad I’m hoping to be in bed not long after midnight?’

‘I’ll be lucky if I make it to midnight,’ Karina chimed in, raising her glass a little.

‘Before this party came up, we were going to spend it watching movies and playing Pokemon.’

‘Rock’n’roll lifestyle, huh?’

He had to admit that the party was a lot more fun than he’d expected. Drinks flowed freely, plenty of delicious food making the rounds on platters, and although it was black tie, there wasn’t much standing on ceremony; the host had made it clear in their speech that the dress code was simply an excuse to dress up to the nines to see in the dawn of a new year.

Even so, Mike seemed to be on his best behaviour. Despite garnering attention from several eager attendees (much to Harvey’s carefully contained chagrin) and having the option to get away for a little while, Mike didn’t seem to stray too far away, always finding him again in the crowds of dancing bodies and cackling gaggles of tipsy partygoers.

He found his way back again, carrying two glasses of water with him this time. ‘Thought you might want to pace yourself.’

‘Talked to anyone interesting?’

‘Well…there was the guy with the beard that seemed to be a little too into the idea of using his belt on my ass…and the woman by the bar who just got widowed for the fourth time and seemed to want to try out, and I quote, “some young, fresh, tender meat”. Pretty sure I could get a midnight kiss of both of them at the drop of a hat. Or my pants.’

Harvey almost snorted the iced water up his nose.

‘What about you, huh? I saw a lot of people looking your way. Travis’s colleague is cute,’ Mike continued, gesturing to a woman dancing with some of her friends near to one of the windows. Jewel-toned green dress and wedges contrasted starkly against cool-toned brown skin and dark hair in tight brown curls. It must have been the woman that Travis had been talking about a week ago. Harvey swallowed; she looked just a little too much like Jessica for his liking.

Harvey shook his head. ‘I’m not really feeling the whole hook-up thing tonight. I might let it get to eleven and then head up.’

‘Not gonna stick around for a kiss at midnight?’

‘I’m not that into New Years.’

The hours ticked away, Harvey having more fun than he’d thought he’d have; he did his duties as Uncle Harvey and danced with the kids until his feet hurt, nudged Mike into joining him when the kids wanted to see ‘Uncle Mike’ bust out his dance moves. The minutes wound down, and as if out of nowhere, it was suddenly eleven-fifty-eight, ticking ever closer to midnight.

When there were just a few seconds left, Mike turned to him. ‘Come on, bring it in.’

Ten. Mike grinned tipsily at him.

Nine. He hugged him, pulled him in close. ‘Thanks for looking after me this year.’

Eight. ‘You’re welcome.’

Seven. ‘You’re one of the best things that ever happened to me, Harvey.’

Six. ‘I’d do anything for you. You know that, right?’

Five. Mike pulled back, eyes fixing on his.

Four. He knew what was about to happen. Harvey’s heart thudded, skipped a beat before pounding harder, racing.

Three. Mike leaned closer. The smile that had been there was gone, leaving behind something unreadable.

Two. His eyes flicked to Mike’s mouth, back up to meet his gaze. Was he really going to…

One. He faintly registered the lips he’d been looking at moving, saying something. And then as midnight struck, the lips moved in. The noise of the crowd cheering in the new year around them disappeared, the first few off-key bars of Auld Lang Syne silenced in the moment. There was nothing in the room but them, Mike’s mouth moving against his, hands creeping up to latch onto his shoulders, smooth around the back of his neck like he had so desperately wanted to do back in the limo that had brought them there. Harvey savoured the few seconds, and then Mike’s mouth was gone, a few inches away again, opening and closing as if the words he really wanted to speak were refusing to come out.

‘Harvey.’

That was all it took.

He backed Mike across the hotel suite bedroom like a beast stalking prey. Only the victim was willing, kept snaking hands over his body and combing fingers through his hair. There was no time for explanation or conversation, no breaking the moment while it lasted, no time for either one of them to come to their senses.

Mike threw himself back on the end of Harvey’s bed, tugging his bow tie undone before reaching and fiddling with the buttons of his tuxedo pants. He could have sang as Mike looped his fingers through his belt-loops, tugged his hips closer to kiss at his chest and suck hot wet marks against the white of his starched shirt and turn it translucent in patches. He didn’t want to jinx it, didn’t want to speak in case he woke up; he was still half convinced that he was dreaming.

Harvey leaned down, captured Mike’s lips again, flicked tongue against tongue and teeth and lips, moaned into his mouth as a hand slipped into his underwear and grasped his half-hard length. Of all the dreams he’d had, it would have been the most cruel and agonising one of them all, to wake up right then when it felt oh so tangible.

It wasn’t a dream, though. It was real, and stupid, such a fucking terrible idea, but it was Mike’s idea and there was no way he was going to stop unless Mike told him to. Mike’s hand slid up, thumb swiping up over his tip to pull a moan out of him, smoothed back down again to get another. The unoccupied hand worked at the fabric, pushed his pants down to reach more of him, still laying kiss after kiss across his shirt and nosing into his ribs in near-catlike fashion.

Piece by piece, clothing fell to the floor below. Harvey loomed over him, took in every tiny measure of his body, each minute scar and freckle and coarse hair until he reached the thick protrusion between his legs. He salivated, cursing himself for not bringing supplies; all he could think of was how much he wanted to lube him up, have Mike stretch him and prepare him, sink down on him and feel every inch penetrate. The one chance he’d had and he’d blown it.

He made the best of it, elected to kiss down Mike’s throat and collarbone. Mike gasped, smiling, head tilting sweetly back against the sheets, the breathy sounds turning into a long, drawn-out moan as he took the head of Mike’s erection between his lips. He was drunk on the sensations, intoxicated by Mike’s responses as he stopped in his ministrations long enough to suck on two fingers and work them inside of him one by one, and almost choked on Mike when he’d found his prostate and his hips jerked upwards.

The first words since the impassioned ‘Harvey’ finally rang out. ‘Harvey—I’mco—coming—com—‘ the sentence cut short, and Harvey pulled back just in time to watch him, spilling in thick strings over himself as he shuddered and jolted below him. He would have been perfectly contented to simply watch him come down, to lap up the mess with his tongue and kiss and pray that when morning came Mike would still be there, but Mike seemed to have other ideas, catching his breath and pulling him down on the bed.

Neither of them were young men anymore, but it was in that second that he realised that Mike was inexperienced, fumbling for once; he’d never actually had sex with anyone other than a woman before.

_He’s never done this before_. Harvey sobered in an instant. ‘Mike, we haven’t…we can’t without—‘

‘Huh?’

Harvey reached for Mike’s hands. ‘Mike, I can’t do this without the right stuff or it’ll hurt. And you’ve been drinking…’

Mike frowned, eyes searching, before his face relaxed again. ‘Oh.’

Harvey rolled away, rubbing his kiss-sore lips with one hand. He was just drunk enough to ask, just drunk enough to deal with the answer. ‘If you weren’t intoxicated right now, would you have still kissed me?’

Mike moved slowly, reaching for clothes to cover up, gnawing at his bottom lip. Whether he was searching for an answer, or whether he already had one in his head, Harvey couldn’t stand the waiting as Mike redressed himself, covered up fresh love-bites still damp with saliva. It was only when Mike lifted his head from fixing his belt that Harvey saw the tears rolling down his cheeks.

Mike sniffed, hiccupped. ‘I can’t believe I…she hasn’t even been gone a year and I—‘

‘Mike—’

‘I’m fucking disgusting.’ And before he had a chance to stop him, Mike had gone, the doors slamming shut behind him.

He had no idea where Mike went.

After redressing, Harvey searched high and low, asked at the bar, flitted from one partygoer to the next asking if they’d seen him, but nobody had even seen him come back down, let alone leave. At four AM, with the rising throb of a headache, he headed back up to the suite. He showered in the still-cold water, not even bothering to adjust the temperature; he was too numb to care, aware of nothing but the residual sensation of Mike’s lips against his chest as he washed away the evening.

When he was in bed, trying to ignore the smell of Mike on the sheets, he grabbed his phone, typing up a quick message. ‘Mike, please just let me know that you’re safe. I’m worried about you.’

He didn’t get an answer.


	19. Chapter 19

Mike didn’t answer his messages, didn’t turn up until just before check-out.

He didn’t look him in the face as they packed what little items they had brought along. The tux had disappeared quick, replaced by worn jeans and a plain grey t-shirt Harvey had seen him in countless times before, and before he could say two words to him, Mike was already gone again.

The concept that Harvey was about to step into an empty house gnawed at him the entire way home. If Mike couldn’t look at him, sooner or later it would become too difficult to exist in such close quarters in total silence. His heart thudded, a lump in his throat. What if Mike never spoke to him again?

The cat meowing to be fed—even though his bowl was still half-full from the previous evening—was a good sign. If Mike was going to up and leave, he probably wouldn’t leave without Tony, so at least he could rely on one last visit to try and make things right, or do something to convince him to stay. He took it as another good sign that Mike’s cameras were still in the living room, his charging laptop still lying open on the table in the kitchen, too.

He relaxed just a little, put up a pot of coffee just for something to do as he mulled over what to do. In some ways, it felt like it would be easier, better if Mike didn’t have feelings for him. He could let him chalk it up to booze, feel the guilt, and then move on. In other ways, Harvey felt sick to his stomach, the concept that maybe, just possibly Mike was developing and harbouring similar feelings for him now, and he might have blown it all by letting things escalate the previous night.

Harvey put his head into his own arms, letting out a pitiful whine to the empty room. Why did love have to be so difficult? Why did he always fall for the wrong person?

Why did he fall for the right person, and fuck it all up before it could even start?

When exactly he’d fallen asleep, he had no idea, but just after four PM, the door squeaked open and jolted him out of a dreamless doze.

Mike closed the door behind him, leaning back against it and avoiding his eyes. The reddish markings, the bloodshot whites spoke volumes. ‘Hey.’

‘…Hi. Uh…Coffee?’

‘Sure.’

Months of being in each other’s company, sharing things that they hadn’t even told each other when they had been working together, and suddenly it appeared as if their entire friendship was going to end with a few one-word sentences, their conversations damned to be about nothing more than the weather and caffeine. Harvey placed the mug in front of Mike, sitting back in the seat he’d fallen asleep in and sipping his own.

Maybe he’d been wrong. Maybe they’d never have another conversation again. Mike sat there for a while, fingertips sliding over the rim of the cup and over the curve of the handle, the liquid inside rippling a little at each stroke.

After what felt like hours, Mike broke the silence. ‘I wouldn’t have kissed you if I hadn’t been drinking. But it’s not because I wouldn’t have wanted to.’

He looked up from his coffee. Mike still wouldn’t meet his eyes.

‘Did you ever figure out that…while we were working together, I had a crush on you?’

Harvey’s mug almost fell out of his grip. ‘What?’

‘Yeah. When you came around to see me, after Grammy died. Sort of started in the pot haze and I chalked it up to that. Pushed myself to get over it, because I was in the closet and I thought…you know, you, _straight_.’

‘Can’t say I ever picked up on it.’ Harvey put his cup down, trying to hide the quiver his grip had taken on.

‘…Were you kissing me back because you felt like you were obliged to? Or because you felt sorry for me?’

‘No, no. I, uh, kissed you back because I wanted to.’ Finally, Mike looked him in the eyes, and Harvey smirked. ‘What, you think I go down on and finger anyone who kisses me?’

Mike’s cheeks turned crimson. ‘Jesus, Harvey.’

Harvey chuckled quietly, chewed his lip. ‘Sorry. Sometimes bluntness just comes out, and I’m really not in the right state to sugarcoat things right now.’

‘Well, if that’s what we’re doing…if you hadn’t have stopped me, I would have kept going. But that would have been wrong. It was wrong not to stop after just a kiss at midnight. It’s just there was a little part of me that needed to know that even for a minute or two, I was allowed feel a connection to someone else again without forgetting her.’

‘You’re allowed to feel that. Maybe you just aren’t ready.’

‘I know. And I’m not. But, when I am, if I ever am…oh god, I can’t ask—‘

‘Ask me.’

‘Harvey, I can’t ask that of you. I can’t ask you to put your romantic life on hold for me to—’

‘I love you.’

And like that, it was out. It was in the air, hanging between them like condensed breath in the cold, only heavier and choking and Harvey sucked in a deep breath. Mike was frozen in place, staring back into his eyes as if he’d changed his entire view of the world around them. Nothing would, could, ever be the same. Not after that.

Harvey exhaled. ‘I love you. I don’t fully know for how long I’ve been in love with you, but I do, and I am. And if you’re trying to ask me to wait for you to feel ready, I’ll do it for as long as you need me to, or until you tell me that it’s not something that will happen at all.’

‘I can’t—‘

‘You can. Do it.’

‘Harvey—’

‘I love you. Ask me.’

‘You can’t put your life on hold for me.’

‘You’re a part of my life. You can ask me. I do still have the power of veto when you ask me, you know. You haven’t got that control over me.’

’It doesn’t stop me feeling like I’m taking away your free will.’

‘Bitch, I do what I want.’ At that, Mike spluttered, and it didn’t take long for the chuckle turning to an all-consuming cackling. Harvey grinned, shoulders unclenching. At least he could still make him laugh. ‘Go on, ask me.’

Mike slowly calmed, sobered, a smile remaining. ‘Why would you wait for me?’

‘Because, despite all of the things that are screaming that I shouldn’t have, I took a chance on you once. And it…wasn’t a… _smooth_ ride. But I got one of the best things that ever happened to me in spite of all the shit that went wrong, and I’m thinking that I should take a chance like that again.’

‘Last time, you almost ended up doing prison time for me. You lost your license to practice law.’

‘I got better mental health, a cat, and I live with my best friend. I’d say that getting to maybe one day call you my boyfriend is a gamble worth betting on if you’re saying you have feelings for me too.’

Mike breathed out slowly, nodded. ‘I do have feelings for you.’

‘That’s all I need.’

The silence that fell that time was serene. Mike rose from his seat, moved close to him and leaned in until their lips were barely an inch apart, and then kissed him, closed-mouthed and chaste. ‘Can you wait for me?’

‘Of course.’


	20. Chapter 20

January seemed to disappear behind them in a matter of minutes, and as February came into view, Harvey knew that the number of days until the anniversary of that day was drawing ever closer.

Mike had been trying to hide it from him, but Harvey couldn’t not notice the little changes; the way he’d withdraw into himself, go to bed early only to emerge in the morning with sore swollen eyes; the disinterest in new games; the stall in his writing as his laptop lay abandoned for weeks on end, the notebook overflowing with ideas left alone on top of it. He distracted him the best he could, bringing Mike to work with him some days and letting him follow him around as he sprouted, seeded, advised others of how to take care of their plants. He’d heard that it was good for people to spend time around plants and fresh air, and even if it wasn’t a huge difference, it had brought Mike out of his shell a little.

Go-Eun nudged him in the side as she walked past him one morning, the potted sapling of a maple in her gloved hands swaying with her. ‘Where’s Mike today? How’s he doing?’

Harvey shrugged. ‘It’s almost a year since it happened, I think it’s just going to hit him harder around this time of year.’

‘It’s natural. Hey, if you want, bring him around Saturday night. I’m making stew.’

‘That spicy one you did last time? With the tofu?’

‘Not just any tofu. Homemade tofu, buddy. You’re never going to be able to eat the prepackaged stuff again, mark my words. Hiro loves it.’

‘…Hiro? Who is he, and do I have to bring an angry cat to deal with him? Tony just got snipped and he’s wearing the cone of shame, he could rough him up real good with those soft-boy head-rubs.’

Go-Eun rolled her eyes. ‘Hiroyuki. He’s a very nice gentleman I met when he was working in the cafe next to my gym. He asked if he could grab my bowls, I heard balls. It was all very mature and sophisticated.’

‘You almost died laughing, didn’t you?’

‘Couldn’t _breathe_ I was laughing so hard. Anyway, making stew, watching shitty TV and making fun of the bad plotlines. You two are free to join and gorge yourselves on it with us and my grandma if you want.’

Harvey nodded. ‘Thanks. I’ll let you know what he says.’

Not much had changed when Harvey returned home. Mike was still in the same place he’d been that morning; lying on the couch with a pillow under his head, blanket halfway up his back watching whatever happened to be on the TV at the time.

Harvey walked up, dumping his keys on the coffee table and nudging his feet. ‘You gonna take up the whole couch? Not sure my old-man back can handle sitting on the floor for too long.’

Mike said nothing, but shifted his legs, making room. Harvey sat down, then lifted Mike’s legs back to where they had been over his lap.

‘Go-Eun wants to know if you want to go watch tv and eat jjigae with her and her boyfriend on Saturday night. Her grandma’s been told to keep her hands away from our asses.’

‘Maybe.’ Mike turned his head, chewing his lip. ‘What time is it?’

‘Nearly six. You want dinner?’

‘Not really.’

Harvey sighed, rubbed a hand on Mike’s pyjama-covered calf. ‘What about if I made tea? I brought home cookies.’

Mike shrugged, hesitated, and then finally nodded. ‘Actually, yeah, that sounds good.’

‘Earl Grey?’

‘Sure. So how was work today?’

‘Besides the invite for delicious food? A kid came in and managed to rip up four different saplings out of the pots because his mother wouldn’t buy him a succulent that had pretty colours in it. She was a total Karen about it and refused to pay for the damage, so I spent most of the afternoon replanting the trees and hoping they’ll be okay.’

Mike sat up, stretched and groaned with a grimace. ‘Ugh. If that was my kid, he’d lose his allowance for a year.’

‘If that was your kid, he would have never done that in the first place.’ Harvey gestured with the cookie tub, then threw it into Mike’s waiting hands. ‘I’d have been more sympathetic if she wasn’t blatantly ignoring the chaos the kid was making. But nope…our fault for not keeping the trees out of his reach. God forbid we keep them at that level for people who can’t reach higher than that.’

Tea brewing, Harvey walked back over with the pot on a tray. He’d forgone buying a full tea service—he wasn’t an old lady holding tea parties—but it was nice to have the big pot that was convenient for pouring out a huge mug to cradle in the cold weather. That night was one of those cold-weather nights, and he could tell they were both feeling the chill when Mike left the room and came back wearing the thickest, fluffiest pair of pale pink socks he’d ever seen in his life.

Mike pointed at him as he sat back down. ‘Don’t you dare comment.’

‘I’m not. I just wasn’t aware that you could wear dyed angora rabbits as footwear without bringing about the wrath of PETA.’

‘You laugh now, Specter. But when you lose your toes to frostbite, I will be laughing. And then I will buy you a pair of these fluffy socks to save the rest of your feet, and you’ll rue the day you laughed at me.’

‘Yeah, yeah. They do look warm, I’ll say that.’

Mike lifted both feet up, planting them in lap in invitation. It had been over a month since the disaster of New Year, and with no secrets anymore, nothing felt like something to be cautious about. Mike knew that he was in love with him, and they had been even closer in recent weeks, even less reserved about physical contact than they had been before. Even so, there was a part of him that resisted hope, didn’t want to get attached to any idea of him and Mike any more than he already was, and suddenly touching his socked feet felt like an act of intimacy he wasn’t sure he should get involved in.

Harvey poked one foot, felt the fabric. ‘You’re basically wearing blankets on your feet. This is just that sherpa blanket on your bed made into socks.’

Mike sipped his tea and took a bite out of one of the cookies. ‘If you’re done making fun of my amazing socks, I have some you can wear if you’re cold.’

‘I’m good, but I might steal them for tomorrow at work. It’s even colder there, even in boots.’

Mike shrugged, turned his gaze back to the TV, his feet staying firmly crossed in their resting place on his blanket-covered lap.


	21. Chapter 21

On the anniversary, Harvey took the day off.

He hadn’t really known what to expect. Grief could manifest in so many different ways, and his way of dealing with it had always been to push it down, cover it up with work, wait until he was alone to finally let it all out, then get up the next day and start all over again as if it never affected him.

When he woke up that morning, he wasn’t expecting Mike to be up before him. And he certainly wasn’t expecting him to be freshly showered, and in the midst of frying eggs and brewing coffee as if it was like any other day.

Harvey walked up to the table, sat down. ‘Morning.’

‘Morning. There’s fresh bread in the bread-maker, and bacon under the grill.’

Indirect approach was probably safer. ‘What’s your plans today?’

Mike tapped the spatula on the side of the pan and scooped the eggs onto the plates. ‘I was thinking I’d go visit Grammy’s grave. And then…I was going to arrange to have something done to Rachel’s ashes today.’

‘What were you thinking of?’

‘I wanted to get some of them sealed into a piece of jewellery. I was actually thinking of getting three of them made, so I could send some to the Zanes.’

Harvey paused in making space for the plates. ‘Do you want me to go with you to give them? I mean, in case Robert isn’t…just in case?’

‘I’ll be okay. Would…’ Mike trailed off, swallowed thickly. ‘Would you just be at home when I get back?’

‘Sure. I took the day off anyway. Just let me know when you’re getting back and I’ll make sure there’s junk food available.’

Mike snorted. ‘I’m not sure eating my feelings is a good idea at my age.’

‘It’s not a good idea at my age, but here I am, enabling and indulging. Pizza?’

Mike pointed at him with the spatula from the eggs. ‘Cheese in the crusts, or no deal.’

‘Still a child.’

‘Still a dick.’

‘No, that’s Tanner. But at least he’s consistent.’ At that, Mike snorted, and Harvey relaxed. At least he was able to make Mike laugh once that day.

Mike didn’t turn up until it was nearly time for dinner, clutching a small box and a bunch of receipts. One box, not three.

As soon as the door was closed, Harvey took the items out of his hands, replaced them with a mug of hot chocolate while eyeing one of the paper slips. ‘You posted them? I could have come with you to drop them off.’

‘I didn’t want Robert throwing it in my face.’ Mike sighed, rolled the mug between his hands. ‘And I haven’t spoken to Laura in person since I took the stuff to them in Seattle.’

‘Why not ask her to dinner, or lunch? She did say to keep in touch.’

‘Maybe. I’m worried about bringing up things.’

‘From the sounds of it, you were like a son to her. I’m sure she’ll be happy to see you.’

Mike sat down, rolling his head from side to side, wincing as his joints cracked. ‘I’m scared of contacting her in case she didn’t mean what she said. Or maybe I’ve left it too long to talk to her.’

Harvey placed his hand on his shoulder, thumbed the smooth flesh leading to his neck. In the days leading up to then, Mike had accepted physical affection even more easily than usual; leaning his head on his shoulder as they watched TV, drawing him into embraces out of nowhere, letting skin-on-skin contact linger before pulling away. The touches were becoming more commonplace, normalised, welcomed, and with their feelings out in the open—and Harvey’s heart visible and a beating target on his sleeve—it was becoming difficult to imagine or remember a time where they hadn’t been quite so tactile with each other.

He turned Mike’s head towards him with his fingers, rubbing the rough stubble on his chin with the tip of his thumb. ‘If you want to get in touch with them, I’ll be there.’

‘Thank you.’ The corners of Mike’s mouth tilted, then fell again. He stilled, eyes moving down, up, back down.

Harvey had seen that before. ‘You okay?’

‘Just…stay still a second.’

Harvey obeyed, standing still and observing. Mike stood from the chair, moved just enough to turn, then touched his cheek with a hand that wouldn’t stop shaking to turn his face fully towards his. The kiss was more expected, but wholly unfamiliar and far less sloppy than their tipsy and disastrous New Year tryst. It was more certain, firmer, insistent as Mike pressed a bare hint of tongue against his lip and he let him in. Mike’s other hand found the other side of his face, and he moaned softly into the kiss before pulling away and pressing their foreheads together.

Harvey let out a shuddering sigh. ‘Wow.’

Mike chuckled, breathless. ‘It made me feel light-headed.’

‘So much better sober, by the way.’

‘Would you, uh…do you wanna go get coffee at some point tomorrow? Maybe during your lunch?’

‘Sure, just tell me where to—’

‘I mean, like a, date kind of thing.’

Harvey leaned away, stared back. ‘Are you sure you’re ready? It’s only been a year. Some people need more time.’

He met with a shrug. Mike bit his lip. ‘In spite of what my guilt keeps telling me, I can’t stop thinking about you. And you’re right. She’d want me to be happy. So I have to try, right?’

‘If you want to. But if you need more time—’

‘I’ll tell you. I swear.’ He smiled again, tired, soft and calm. ‘It’s basically a formality, asking you. We kind of know everything about each other anyway…it’s not as if we have to make awkward small talk over coffee. But it’ll be nice to take you out somewhere.’

‘What about instead of coffee, we just go for a walk? In the park? We could take those vacuum coffee cup things we bought a few weeks ago, maybe some sandwiches or pasta with us.’

‘Have a picnic in the park…in the middle of winter?’

‘Okay fair point. What about we wait until Saturday, and then we take a walk together with out cameras and then we come back here and barbecue some chicken thighs on the grill outside in that spicy marinade you like?’

Mike grabbed his hand, squeezed it. ‘It’s a date.’


	22. Chapter 22

The first date started out feeling much more like two friends hanging out together. And maybe that was okay.

The walk had started like almost any other walk they had taken; a foot or so apart, coffee in hand and, on that occasion, a camera swinging pendulously from each of their necks from tan faux leather straps. Mike stopped a few times, handed over the coffee to hold to take a few snaps of some toddlers playing in the frosty grass with their parents, a woman walking a dog that looked like a mix of a corgi and a malamute, some flowers blooming out of season. He handled the camera expertly, a touch more roughly than Harvey was comfortable with; he knew the cost of it and his carefully curated collection of lenses now—a cost that had made his eyebrows rise and his jaw clench—and a small part of him froze when it swung a little too close to the ground, a wall, the side of a table in a cafe, a metal grate on the street. Mike seemed unworried by any of it, letting the metal get scraped and dinged until it had lost its original smooth lustre. When he’d had asked whether it bothered him, Mike had shrugged it off. ‘If I start getting precious about it, I’ll never end up using it. I’m not gonna be one of those weird photographers who never makes use of their fancy cameras just in case it gets the slightest scratch. The vintage film ones survived warzones. I’m pretty sure this one can handle a few scuffs from being thrown around New York and still retain a decent amount of resale value when I do eventually upgrade it.’

Harvey was just thankful that he hadn’t been gifted the same one; he would have never let it leave the damn box it came in, not at eight grand before tax for just the body. Anyway, the inconspicuousness of the one Mike had given him in all its black-painted metal and classic design suited him just fine.

Mike took the coffee back, cradling his cup between his hands as if the warmth of the contents would penetrate the metal layers. He gestured to Harvey’s own pristine camera. ‘See anything you want to take pictures of yet?’

‘Besides you cuddling up to Swedish Vallhunds and dreaming for a puppy-shaped buddy for Tony? Not yet. I think I prefer architecture. Sharp lines, angularity, everything reaching up to the sky…’

Mike nudged his elbow playfully. ‘You miss your condo a little there?’

He narrowed his eyes back in jest. ‘Yeah, maybe a little. The interior design was well-coordinated, and the building itself was gorgeous. But even so, I wouldn’t swap my little fixer-upper for it now.’

‘Yeah, I like the house better too. What about next time, we go nearer Times Square, Broadway? The lights would look really good at night.’

Harvey nodded, clicking the cap on his own cup absent-mindedly. ‘I’d love to photograph some of the busy districts in Tokyo. All the lights, the bright signs, the colour of everything, the buildings…’

‘Maybe we should book a trip. A few weeks in Japan, leave Tanner to take care of Tony.’

‘That was a lot of T’s in one sentence.’

‘I’m secretly an alliteration slut. Sue me.’ Mike wiggled his eyebrows. ‘Besides, I’ve never been. I’d love to go.’

His mind whirled over all of the movies he’d seen over the years, the sudden cinematic visual of Mike dressed in a robe—maybe a yukata after having stepped out of their own private onsen—passing through his mind, pulling the belt undone and tugging the cotton coverings away to allow him access. If he was honest, he could be in one of his old cheap suits, his zip-up hoodie with the frayed drawstrings, or even his ageing threadbare bathrobe he refused to throw out and replace and it would have the same effect; it was _all_ about that slow reveal of his body from under cloth, the parting his thighs, the pulling his clothing away and letting Harvey ravish every inch of him.

Mike disrobing probably wasn’t the best train of thought to follow when they were in public. They were meant to be taking it slow, and slow did not include fantasising about tugging his ancient bathrobe open and fucking his pliant, moaning body into the nearest available surface, even if it did make for a very pretty picture in his mind.

Harvey swallowed, cleared his throat and shuddered. ‘It’s a lot colder than I thought it’d be.’

Mike nodded. ‘We could go back and make food now. I’m kind of hungry.’

As they walked the long way back, as if they’d always done it, Mike’s hand automatically found and linked with his own and stayed there the whole way home.

‘Oh shit…uh, I hope you like your chicken spicy.’

The words were muffled, but Harvey still heard them through the back door. He rolled his eyes, grinned knowingly. ‘You just tipped the entire bottle of wing sauce in the bowl, didn’t you?’

‘We’re gonna need more blue cheese sauce. You got a bucket?’

He trailed outside to the barbecue, breaking the seal on one of the beers in hand open and handing it to Mike before inspecting the damage. The chicken still looked good, even drowning in spicy sauce. ‘You don’t care if my burps taste like tabasco, right?’

Mike turned, looking at his lips. ‘Only if you don’t give a shit that mine’ll smell like stilton for two days straight.’

‘I can handle it.’ They weren’t very good at not rushing things. As more meat crackled and smoked away on the grill to their side, Mike leaned, pushed their mouths together insistently. He was still in his outdoor coat from earlier, but the layer that Harvey had shed to move easier while in the kitchen made it easier for Mike to grip at his shoulders, slip hands back around his neck and into his hair to scrunch and scrape and smooth between his fingers. Harvey shuddered and reciprocated, wrapping both arms around Mike’s waist and dipping one down to the small of his back to press him closer. And he would be lying if it he said it hadn’t delighted him as Mike’s hips had canted towards his and _rubbed_. His morality nagged, flip-flopping dizzyingly between extremes. Was it immoral of him to not stop Mike from moving so fast? Was it more immoral to stop him and cause him unnecessary guilt? And just how wrong would it be to let it go just a tiny bit further, to sink down on his knees in front of him and taste him again?

He brushed off the thoughts, let the kiss end naturally for the moment. Mike beamed back at him, breathless and pink-lipped as he flipped the food with the tongs. ‘I can cope with a few hot sauce burps, Mr Specter.’

‘Bring on the blue cheese, Mr Ross.’

The sudden idea Mike might one day be known as ‘Mr Specter’ almost made his heart skip a beat.


	23. Chapter 23

The day had started off normal.

Mike came into his room to kiss him awake before going off to his favourite overpriced cafe to write, and ten minutes later, Harvey would crawl out of bed to drag himself into a hot shower to get ready for a day of planting even more hipster plants for influencers to keep and subsequently kill; he’d tended to so many succulents in the past few weeks, he was surprised he wasn’t having nightmares of them being ten feet tall and enclosing him like the field in ’In The Tall Grass’. Coffee, head to work, and come back later and make something to eat that was more healthy than the take-out that Mike really desperately always wanted to get but would fill the hole left by that same craving.

Only that morning, he didn’t have work, and after Mike had left and he was in the middle of pouring some coffee into a travel cup to go for a walk with his camera, the last person he expected to be there knocked on the door.

Donna leaned with her weight on one hip under the doorframe, looking wonderful and perfectly coifed and made-up, wearing what might have been casual wear for her that day but was now considered smart for him; well-tailored black jeans, white shirt, a mustard yellow bow tie and black suit jacket around her shoulders with a complementary yellow carnation poking through the buttonhole. For once, she wore completely flat shoes in place of the high heels she had once teetered around in through the law firm, and yet that just wasn’t the reason that she looked so much shorter than he remembered.

Something was just different.

She half-smiled, crimson lips tight. ‘Hi Harvey.’

Donna had once been a master of hiding emotions, masking them behind nonchalance, the right amount of office bitch, always-ready, all-knowing, near-omnipotent with the cover of being ‘just a legal secretary’.

There was probably little questioning what was on her mind today, but Harvey chose to feign ignorance. He cleared his throat, feeling as if both he and his humble home were underdressed as he welcomed her into the room. ‘Come on in. How long are you in New York for?’

‘A few days. Photo shoot before the wedding.’ Her voice quivered at ‘wedding’.

‘I heard. Congratulations.’ She’d had the soft lines on her forehead Botoxed away, soft lines he’d more than once caught himself staring at with fondness. She was frowning though, even if her eyebrows didn’t move as much anymore. ‘When’s it going ahead?’

‘In six weeks. We’re going to be on the cover of a couple of magazines, and a few articles are running in the next week or so.’

Harvey nodded. It wasn’t a work day, but he almost wanted to go to work, have an excuse to ask her to leave politely without confrontation.

‘So…you’ve changed a lot.’

He took that as code that she wanted to know how the fuck he ended up in a fixed-up fixer-upper seemingly a million miles away from the cold glamour of his old high-rise condo, sans a license to practice law. In all fairness, it was a valid question.

Harvey smiled, sipped his too-hot coffee. ‘Sometimes change is good. I sold my condo, then got disbarred…and I can actually say, I’ve never been happier or more content in my entire goddamn life.’

‘Happy looks good on you.’ Donna bit a red lip, her eyes flicking between his and his eyes. It told him everything he needed to know.

He asked anyway. ‘What about you?’

‘…He’s, uh, cheating on me. There’s this actress fresh out of college who he met on the set of some B-movie he was doing a shitty cameo for.’ She stepped closer. ‘He barely notices that I’m there most of the time, and doesn’t really like it when he does.’

‘You deserve better than that, Donna.’

‘You’re better. You always were.’

She stepped forward, within touching distance, and he lifted a hand to her shoulder. She stopped dead, and he shook his head. ‘I can’t.’

‘It’s not like—‘

‘I’m with someone. And I’m happy.’

‘Harvey—’

He shook his head, gesturing for her to sit down. He sat opposite, reaching across the table to grasp a soft hand in his calloused one. ‘We didn’t work. We tried to stay friends, and it ended up with you on the other side of the country with this dick of a movie director who keeps fucking twenty-year-old actresses in their trailers and probably told you that you needed to get injections because you looked too old. Which, if I may say so, is bullshit to begin with because you’re ageless, and if you’re going to get that kind of thing done, you goddamn do it for yourself and nobody else. What the fuck did this asshole do to you?’

She twitched, wounded, eyes watery and jaw clenched. He’d sounded a lot harsher than he’d wanted to, and it was clear in an instant what she’d actually wanted from propositioning him; she’d just wanted someone who was familiar, who wasn’t her husband-to-be in all his egotism and self-congratulation and adulterous ways. Someone who felt like they might still have a little bit of heart and soul in a place far away from where naive ones were snapped in half and sold for a dime a dozen every single day.

‘It’s difficult in L.A.’ Donna mumbled, playing with her engagement ring with shaky fingers. She’d lost a little weight too; the ring moved too easily on her slim fingers, looking bonier than before, the skin more papery and thin. ‘It’s a place where everyone gets younger and you stay the same, provided you have money and a plastic surgeon on standby. I feel like I have no power over myself anymore. You have to look good for the screen, look good on his arm, be the perfect little decoration as he accepts an award that quite frankly, he didn’t fucking deserve.’

‘I know…best director and best screenplay, my ass. There’s six movies I saw last year that beat the living shit out of that.’

‘Ugh, tell me about it.’ She didn’t wait for an invitation. Donna stood again, grabbed a mug and poured herself a cup, grabbing the bottle of Irish cream out of the fridge and chucking a double measure into it with two sugars. In that one simple act of making herself at home that was so very Donna, she looked four shades closer to her old self. Comfortable, even. She sipped at the contents of the cup, gesticulated with rolling eyes and a free hand. ‘I had to sit through him rehearsing his goddamn acceptance speech.’

‘Oh hell, I muted the TV when he read it out.’

‘Thanked a god he doesn’t believe in, his parents who he hated, and his dead dog who he used to kick when he was having a shitty day. Didn’t mention him being a dick to me because I got his coffee “too right to get into the writing headspace” or calling me a selfish bitch when I wanted to come out for Rachel’s funeral.’ At that she suddenly gulped, pressed her hand to her mouth as tears sprang forth. ‘Fuck, this still happens every goddamn time I say her name. Last month, I was in Seattle, and I almost sent her a message to see if—’

Without hesitation, Harvey rounded the table and wrapped both arms around her. ‘Hey, hey, it’s okay.’

‘I forgot she was gone. I just forgot, like I could walk into a bar and see her standing there waiting with a cocktail, or I’d turn a corner and she’d be there staring at shoes in a window because she wanted them but didn’t need them and kept finding ways to talk herself out of buying them. I missed my chance to say goodbye to my best friend.’

‘Donna…I’m not going to say you have to, but…’

‘But what?’

‘Your fiance is a cheating, abusive, controlling sleaze-bag, and you need to get the fuck out of there before he drains every last part of you away.’ Harvey pulled back, cupped one cheek with his palm and pushing away a few of the tears that were still pouring down her face. ‘Please don’t let him take away the other woman who can kick my ass.’

She coughed, choked on a laugh. ‘I take it Jessica is the other one?’

‘How did you know?’ He smirked, gesturing to the living room with his head. ‘Do you have some time just to catch up?’

With the air clear, it was as if he and Donna had never slept together the first time around. No pressure, no desire. Whatever spark had once been there was definitely dead and buried, and he was absolutely elated by that thought; suddenly it was perfectly naturally for her to be curled up a few feet away on the couch again, sipping a second cup of sugar- and booze-laced coffee as he caught her up on the juicier details of his life since she’d been gone, and the friendship he had desperately missed was back and just as good as ever.

‘Wait, wait…so you and Mike are—’

Harvey smiled, gazing down into his now-empty cup. ‘Me and Mike are now dating.’

‘…And you seriously never picked up on him being bi too?’

His gaze snapped back to her, incredulous. ‘How did _you_ know?’

‘Please, who are you talking to? I had him pegged from day one. It was the puppy eyes and the desperation to please you so you’d throw another movie quote his way. You too, for that matter.’

‘And you never thought to mention that to me?’

She shrugged, smiled. ‘I never out people unless they ask me to, even if it’s themselves.’

Harvey shook his head. ‘You are seriously too fucking good for that asshole.’

‘Yeah, well…maybe I should go ahead with the wedding anyway. Wait a little while, gather evidence from other women he’s manipulated, then take his career down.’

‘And people say it’s the lawyers that are evil…they never talk about the dark, vengeful sides of the secretaries. Although, to be fair, he deserves all the shit that comes his way.’

‘Yeah, well, be thankful I’m smart with my money. He wanted to open a joint account when we moved in together. I said yes…just didn’t tell him that what I put into it wasn’t _everything_ I had. I’m not that fucking dumb. My old apartment in L.A. that’s been held in trust, the money I got from selling my apartment here, a few little investments that paid well in the last few years…it’s all in accounts that only I and my accountant know about for legal purposes and tax declaration. He doesn’t see what’s on my taxes because he leaves everything to the accountant to try and write off as a work expense.’

‘Yeah, I’m sure buying an overpriced, restored ’67 Pontiac Firebird because he lost his virginity in the backseat in a ninety-second fumble is considered a business expense. If you’re a douchebag.’

‘Probably generous on the ninety seconds.’ There was the Donna he knew and loved.

He grinned around the mug in his hand. ‘It was a ballpark number.’

Donna chuckled, then shifted in her seat to lean closer. ‘Enough about my asshole fiance. What’s Mike like in bed?’

‘Uhh, we haven’t actually—‘

Her face changed in an instant. ‘My god, you’re totally in love with him.’

‘All I said was—’

‘Oh please. You have a penis that seeks out a place to put it the second you become sexually attracted to someone. If you two haven’t been fucking like rabbits, then you’re either waiting for a Viagra prescription, or you’re serious about him.’

‘Easy on the Viagra jokes. I’m serious about him, especially after New Years.’

She frowned. ‘What happened at New Years?’

He told her everything, omitting the sexual elements as much as he could until she rolled her eyes again and told him to quit holding out on her. When he got to the part about him leaving the hotel suite in tears, she clapped a hand over her heart, reminded of her own guilt over the funeral. He talked for almost an hour, detailing the feelings that he knew she was dying to hear and take in. ‘—then we went on our first date a few weeks ago, and…yeah. That’s it.’

‘So you’re not sleeping in the same bed?’

‘Mike tends to stay up late writing a lot at the moment, so no. But, I dunno. I get this feeling that he’s not quite ready to sleep next to someone else yet. There’s still guilt there, which is normal. But the thing I want to do to make him feel better is the thing that could make him feel worse. I’d rather just let him take the wheel and tell me when he’s ready.’

Donna finished her coffee, laid the cup on the coffee table and gestured to outside. ‘Okay. This is about to turn into a sadder conversation again, and I need a walk because I’m starting to get daytime-drunk. Grab that camera you talked about, bring it along.’

He frowned, narrowed his eyes. ‘Where are you leading me, Donna?’

‘The photo shoot I talked about. We can talk more on the way.’


	24. Chapter 24

The photoshoot in question turned out to be nearly fifteen blocks walk away.

The walk wasn’t all bad, though. For what knowledge she also lacked in photography, Donna at least made up for in creative vision, picking out aesthetically-pleasing scenery for him to practice with. They passed a vibrant yellow door not dissimilar to the colour of the carnation still poking out of her buttonhole, so she paused in it for a moment, posed while he shot picture after picture. The next place she stopped—around three blocks in—was covered in the artistic graffiti of a mermaid, and she immediately leaned next to it, reaching out her hand to the mermaid’s like the image of Michelangelo’s ‘The Creation of Adam’ and holding the pose while he played around with the framing and the camera settings to get it just right.

When they started walking again, Harvey turned to her and shook his head, gesturing with the camera. ‘Why are you getting me to take photos of you again?’

‘Because you said you were going out to take photos when I came to the house, and I want some that look a little less generic than the ones that are going to be taken of me in a few hours with the guy that will eventually be my ex-husband.’ She stopped again near the end of the block, checking for traffic before crossing.

‘It doesn’t bother you my skills are on par with an inept gorilla?’

‘Still gonna look better than the pretending-to-be-happy posed shit,’ she replied, walking up to a random person with a cigarette dangling from between their fingers. ‘Hey kid, I’ll give you ten bucks if you give me a smoke.’

Harvey’s head shook harder in disbelief. ‘What? You don’t smoke.’

‘No, but how else are we gonna get the hazy look in the middle of the street on a clear day?’ She handed over the crisp note, borrowing the young man’s lighter to light the end before handing it back. She sucked in a mouthful of smoke, blowing it out slowly between her lips without fully inhaling. ‘Think you can get a good effect from this?’

The smell of the smoke was unpleasant, but he ignored it, tried not to breathe any in as he shot a few photos of her in the self-made clouds and showed her the results for approval. ‘Should have stayed back at the house—I’ve got a couple of joints I was saving for an emergency that would have been a lot more fun, and smelled less shitty than that.’

‘May take you up on that at a later date,’ Donna grinned, stubbing out the half-burned cigarette and throwing it into a trashcan ashtray. ‘So, you want to share a bed with Mike but you’re afraid you’re going to make him feel bad about himself.’

‘Was this photo thing a distraction?’

‘Yes. But I am actually a little drunk and this was fun. Back to the Mike thing.’

He sighed, played with the lens cap that was still cupped in his hand. ‘Yeah. Even if he doesn’t spend the entire night, it would be nice to fall asleep with him there, instead of getting a goodnight kiss and then being left in my room like a kid being put to bed.’

‘Have you discussed this with him?’

‘Not really, for the same aforementioned guilt reasons.’

‘Do you think having sex with him would change anything?’ She asked the question while spritzing herself with perfume from a tiny bottle, chucking gum into her mouth with a deft flick of the wrist. ‘Ugh, you’re right, that cigarette was a mistake.’

‘Told you. I’m not going to pressure him.’

‘Not what I’m saying to do. You’ve given him all the power to veto what happens because you’re ready for everything to happen and he’s not. What if he might be ready for some things, but he’s worried that it’ll lead to everything moving too fast for him? Or, what if he thinks he might be able to take it further, but he doesn’t want to get your hopes up in case he has to stop? For all you know, he could be trying to work himself up to this, and just wants a final nudge from you.’

‘What if I freak him out?’

‘Then you discuss it like two grown adults. Not like, you know…you.’

Harvey stopped playing with the cap, fell into silence as they crossed another road. Maybe she was right. In recent weeks, Mike had been more receptive, kissing him openly, occasionally copping a feel as they made out on the couch while a movie played on in the background and getting to the point of _almost_ dipping a hand into his jeans. They had been getting closer, edging ever nearer to the point they had left off at on the hotel suite bed, but not quite reaching it again.

Was Mike waiting for him to push boundaries?

The photography studio was in an old converted warehouse. Harvey rolled his eyes as Donna lead him into it; run down on the outside, industrial on the inside, complete with the exposed painted pipes and old lights swinging precariously above, illuminating the cleaned-up exposed brickwork. It had a strangely familiar feel, similar to that of his old condo. Cold and sterile and loveless. ‘Like my engagement,’ Donna quipped when he told her. ‘Follow me.’

Harvey glanced around at the empty room as they walked to the other side. ‘Should we even be in here?’

‘Probably not. They’re meant to be making it look more homey with some furniture, and they said something about leather couches and some film equipment as props, something like that. Basically drive home the fact he won an award and milk it for every moment of glory possible.’

‘Sounds cheesier than a fucking fondue.’ Harvey walked up to one of the walls, gestured to the cleaned-up window. ‘This window could be nice, though. Stand here for a second.’

The recent practice paid off. Donna stood before the window. ‘Tell me what to do, Specter.’

Harvey rolled his eyes. ‘When have I ever been able to do that before now? Start off with hands in your pants pockets, weight on your right hip. Chin up, just a little more.’ Snap. ‘Now one eyebrow raised with a smile?’ Snap. ‘Now take one hand out and flip me the bird—yep, like that.’ Snap. He took photo after photo of her, almost filling up an entire memory card with images of her in different poses and playing around with what little items were in the empty room. He got shots of her hanging carefully over the railings of the stairs with her hair flowing down, of her walking tall down the stairs, of her posing against the wall and lying on the floor. And somehow in every single one, whether she was looking up, looking down, or not even looking at all, she dominated everything around her.

He was just getting one of her sitting on the stairs when the doors of the warehouse slid up and open. ‘Miss Paulsen? I’m sorry, we had you down for two.’

Donna stood, brushed herself down before walking up to the young woman who had addressed her. ‘No, no, I just got here early. I was catching up with an old friend. Loretta, this is Harvey Specter. I used to work as his legal secretary.’

The woman that stood before him was timid, shrunken back into her hooded jacket, and as she reached out to shake his hand, Harvey got the sense that she was only working the role to be close to the things that she wanted to be involved in, even if it meant being brow-beaten on a daily basis. ‘Good to meet you, Mr Specter.’

‘Please, just call me Harvey. Sorry, I just haven’t seen Donna in a long time, and I’m a little bit of an amateur photographer.’

‘A little bit?’ Donna smirked.

He stuck out his tongue between his teeth, narrowed his eyes at her playfully. ‘Okay, a definite amateur, but trying to get better.’

‘His boyfriend gave him a camera last year and—’

‘Darling, I thought we were meant to meet back at the hotel?’

The change in Donna’s expression was minute, but Harvey picked up on the tension that gripped her, lifting her shoulders and clenching her jaw. He turned to look behind Loretta, watching as a man he had only ever seen on TV walked up to him holding a garment bag and wearing a tight expression.

Adrian Bond. It was a fake name; before fame, he’d been plain old Andy Botham, a trust fund brat with the right connections who had used nepotism to get himself into the movie business after scraping through film school with passing grades, and his name change to disconnect himself from the real sources of his success. Married three times, and Donna would be the fourth, although countless affairs with many naive and barely-legal actresses had been rumoured to have taken place over the course of his fame. Donna had just confirmed the suspicion for him.

The man walked up to them, pushing the garment bag into Donna’s hands. ‘You know you’re meant to be in that dress I bought you.’

Donna nodded tautly. ‘I know—’

‘Because you know I told you, yellow makes you look washed-out and childish. It’ll take a lot of work in post to correct that.’

It might have been the quickest that Harvey had come to hate someone. As Adrian walked away, arguing with one of the people putting up lights, Harvey turned, raising his eyebrows. ‘You okay?’ He whispered.

Her face was almost white under her foundation. She shrugged. ‘Gotta be.’

‘Please don’t go through with this. Stay in New York. We’ll get you set up again, and you can stay at the house, or maybe with our neighbour…just…’ Harvey turned, glanced to where Adrian was busy yelling at an assistant for bringing cushions in the wrong shade of red. He pointed with a thumb. ‘That is a guy who is not good enough for you.’

‘DONNA! GET CHANGED!’ Adrian shouted.

‘Yeah, okay—’

‘NOW. I’m not having you fuck up my afternoon schedule like you do at home.’

She shook her head. ‘I’d better go get changed.’

‘Please. Think about it.’

As he watched the shoot take place, Donna faking convincing smiles through the pain and the stress, Harvey wondered exactly how insane he was to ask Mike if his ex could crash on the couch.


	25. Chapter 25

When he got home, the familiar meows of Tony welcomed him first. The cat stopped in front of him and stared, the expression saying everything before the creature opened his mouth again. Harvey rolled his eyes. ‘I know, I know, you’re hungry, even though I left you an overflowing bowl. Is Mike home, buddy?’

‘Yes, and don’t feed him. He’s had his dinner already. His meowing is a big fat lie.’ Mike poked his head around the door. ‘He’s just missing you.’

‘I missed him. Missed you, too.’ He stepped up to Mike, wrapping both arms around his waist and drawing him into a kiss against the door frame. It was probably for the best; put him in a good mood before asking the awkward question.

Mike moaned against his lips, breaking away to suck in a breath. ‘God, Harvey…’

‘What?’ He teased.

No answer. Instead Mike kissed him again, began to step him backwards past the coffee table and pushed him onto the couch. ‘I finished writing my first draft today.’

‘You did?’

Mike climbed into his lap, kissed down his nose to his lips. ‘Uhuh…and then I had an idea for a really dirty short story and wrote that too.’

Harvey smiled against his lips. ‘Get you hot under the collar?’

‘Got me hot, period—‘ his hips rocked forward against Harvey’s abdomen— ‘Harvey, want you to…’

‘You want me to jerk you off?’

Mike shook his head, kissed his throat, his shoulder. ‘Fingers. Like New Years. It’s all could fucking think about. I wrote about it, how it felt when you touched me like that.’

There was only so much self-control he had, and the thought of Mike recounting their previous encounter in vivid words on a screen, getting hot and desperate and needing his touch so much pushed the question he needed to ask onto the back-burner. Right then, all that existed was him, and Mike, and the breathy gasps he kept letting out as Harvey plunged a hand down the front of his jeans to grasp at his stiff length and stroke. It was different, so much better sober and clear-headed, knowing that Mike wanted it as much as he did for the right reasons that time. He nipped wet lines down Mike’s t-shirt, kissed back up bare flesh when Mike pulled the offending fabric off and threw it behind him, and kept palming him under the fabric.

Mike moaned, brow furrowed. ‘God…oh fuck…’

‘We need…need lube—‘

‘Harvey—Harvey—‘

‘Bedroom.’

He wasn’t sure Mike remembered reaching the bedroom, or being backed up the stairs and through the door until he was on his back on Harvey’s sheets just like at New Years. He smelled good, tasted better, salty with sweat and anticipation. Harvey reached into the drawer next to the bed, pulled out the bottle he knew was in there, and as soon as he had slicked up his fingers, Mike was stripped bare, erection up against his belly and biting his lip, waiting impatiently. His own stomach lurched pleasantly, undoing his own jeans with his free hand. ‘God, you look fucking delicious.’

‘Enough talking. Please—OH—‘ Harvey cut Mike off with a kiss, shoving his fingers roughly inside him at the same time and feeling heat surround them. As he hooked them, dragged the pads of his fingertips over Mike’s prostate and watched as his chest heaved, the idea that they were coming closer to it, drawing nearer to that moment where he could join their bodies and thrust into that tight heat almost had him finishing before they’d even begun. When had he gotten so close?

As it turned out, Mike was even closer; a few more wriggles of his fingers, rubbing circles and flicking around that little sweet spot, and he wailed beneath him, breathing ragged as he came across his bare stomach. His eye were hazy, glazed over when he gazed up at him as he caught his breath. ‘How are you so good at that?’

Harvey leaned and pecked his lips, letting his fingers slip free and dragging them up Mike’s sensitive length as he went. ‘I’ve had a little practice over the years.’

‘Oh yeah? Just how much?’

‘Do I detect jealousy?’

‘No…maybe a little. I don’t want to think of your exes right now. I want to finish you off too.’

His ex. Donna. All sexual ardour wilted, his focus diverted irreversibly to the subject he should have brought up before their little heavier-than-heavy petting session. Harvey chewed his lip, then rolled off Mike and pulled them face-to-face. No more waiting. ‘Okay…shit…I have something serious I need to talk to you about before we get into that.’

The conversation felt like it took an age to reach a natural conclusion. As he explained the situation, Mike listened carefully, playing with the pillowcase under his hand as he went over everything, and when he’d finished, Harvey reached for the restless fingers and linked them with his own. ‘She needs to get out of there.’

‘That sounds…Jesus.’

‘He’s a total fuck-wad. You should have heard the way he spoke about her.’

Mike sat up a little. ‘Were you…worried? About how I was going to react?’

Harvey turned his head a little, let it rock from side to side. ‘I don’t know how long she’d be staying. And I didn’t want to seem like I was pushing you to sleep in the same bed as me. You still control how fast everything goes, that doesn’t change. She could take my room, and I can sleep on the couch—’

‘No.’

‘No?’

‘…Maybe we could try sleeping next to each other. Tonight. I mean, I practically rode your hand a few minutes ago, and I can barely move as it is,’ Mike snorted.

‘You ready for that?’

‘I want to wake up next to you. Am I happy about the idea of your ex staying in the house? Honestly, not really. But I also know that this is your house, and you wouldn’t be asking unless it was serious.’

‘It’s your house too.’

‘It’s not. I just live here rent-free and occasionally make food that doesn’t suck.’

Harvey sat up further, drew Mike into his arms. ‘Well, you are my boyfriend. I think that counts as us being moved in together, and after what I did to you before, definitely living in sin. And while rent-free, you do buy groceries, and pay half of the internet bill now. And it’s not like there’s a mortgage to contribute to. Plus, we use your Netflix password, so you’re definitely not leeching. And even if you were, you do have a say in this.’

Mike played with the front of his t-shirt, chewing his lip and staring into space for a while. The quiet sound of breaths and fabric rustling filled the silence. And then—

‘Do you think you’ll end up feeling something for her again?’

_So that’s what was on his mind_. ‘No. That was well-established when we were talking.’

‘How do you know?’

‘Because I love you, and I can’t imagine myself being with anyone else but you.’ He caught Mike’s hand, palm to palm, and then traced the metal loop of Mike’s still firmly-seated wedding ring. ‘And one day, if it’s something we both want, I’d love to put another ring next to this one.’

‘…And…maybe I can tell our kids about how I met both of you.’

‘Definitely.’ Harvey smiled, gripped his hand and pulled it to his lips to kiss his fingers, and Mike’s mouth soon followed, pressing kiss after kiss against his lips and cheeks and throat. Hot breath ghosted his collarbone, and he moaned. ‘Oh…’

‘I want to make you feel as good as you made me feel before. God you made me feel good.’ Mike breathed against his chest again, his actions saying everything Harvey needed to know what he meant; Mike’s fingers on his free hand danced down past his navel, pushed under the layers of fabric and pulled his returning erection free. The warmth, the slight dampness of Mike’s palm mixed with his own precome eased the first few slides of his hand, and Harvey’s eyes fluttered closed.

It was better than the fantasies, the forbidden ones he’d had back when Mike had been an impossible dream. Mike touched him, stroked him, slipped further down his body to lap at his length with his tongue and flick the tip of it at the slit in a way that made his hips move of their own accord. One hand found the pillow, the other sliding through Mike’s sweat-damp hair and curling between the strands as he resisted the urge to push his head down. Every ridge of Mike’s palate, the slight graze of teeth and the slick undulating muscle pressing into the under side brought him closer, and closer, and suddenly he was almost there and barely hanging on.

Still resisting, Harvey’s hand shook as he yanked at the back of Mike’s head. ‘M-move your head—fuck I’m gonna come—Mike, move—mo—co—ohh...’

Mike stayed there, milked him for every drop before swallowing everything, then lay next to him with his head inches from his now-flaccid length, staring at it with strange fascination. ‘You came a lot more than I thought you would.’

‘Hnnmm.’

He felt the chuckle more than he heard it. ‘I take it that it was good?’

‘I’ll tell you when my brain lands. If it lands.’

Mike laughed into his hip. ‘Guess you can sometimes learn things from porn.’


	26. Chapter 26

The headline in its various incarnations appeared in articles on every social media platform:

‘Bond Breakup: Adrian And Donna Split!’

‘Multi-Award Winner Dumped By Fiance Two Weeks Before Wedding’

‘Donna Paulsen Breaks Off Engagement With Adrian Bond: Did She Cheat?’

Every trashy website and newspaper was condemning her, speculating about infidelity and money and spreading poisonous rumours about her.

And yet, as Mike moved his stuff into Harvey’s room, slipping his clothes into drawers and onto hangers right next to his, Donna was the veritable image of unfazed, lazing around in the middle of her rumpled duvet in her silky sage-green pyjamas with her hair unkempt and teeth unbrushed, flipping through several books of palettes to pick out colours for the new home she was yet to find. The change was, in Donna fashion, as dramatic as the poorly-written headlines; she’d gone from strained and on the verge of breakdown to spa-day level of relaxed in just a few short days. After a couple of nights in a hotel away from her ex-fiance—with a personal bodyguard watching over her door in case he decided to turn up uninvited—her stuff had been boxed and shipped from one end of the country to the other by a few trusted associates back in Los Angeles, and was now being stacked and partly unpacked into Harvey and Mike’s now spare bedroom for the time being.

She pursed her lips, humming. ‘I’m not going to be changing the walls in here or anything, but if I can at least pick out some little decor items to test it out, I’ll be able to do everything else when I have a new place.’

Harvey pushed a flatter box out of the way on top of the wardrobe. ‘I like the bedsheets you picked out on the second section of the first one.’

‘The pale blue one with the copper accents?’

‘Yeah.’

‘Too…don’t know, but it’s not there. I think I like the peach tones better. Maybe the peach, with some yellow accents?’

Mike shoved his head around the door. ‘You could go with dark wood, maybe a few touches of teal to break through the warmer colours and make it feel more calming, too.’

‘Ohh…’ she glanced up, eyes glazing over, ‘it’ll be like a summer cocktail.’

Harvey walked over, wrapped his arms around Mike’s waist. ‘We could make cocktails tonight to go with dinner. Peach lemonade with a little rum would go well with spicy beef slivers.’

‘Mm, sounds good.’ Mike returned the gesture, pecking him on the lips. ‘What sort of movie should we watch?’

‘Well, as Donna’s the guest, maybe she has a suggestion. What do you say?’

She smiled, closing the magazine she’d been flipping through. ‘I say anything where my ex didn’t write or direct it or plaster his name all over it for credit is fine by me. Something…ridiculous.’

‘“Mortal Kombat” it is.’

Donna stood. ‘I’ll drink to that. Now, I’m gonna go get showered and brush my teeth, and then you guys can help me look for a new apartment over pancakes.’

Donna’s pancakes were delicious, even if they were a total mess and looked more like scrambled eggs. As he stabbed the last bite with his fork, Harvey pointed to a listing on his laptop screen. ‘What about this one?’

She paused in scrubbing the pan she’d used, read the listing and then shook her head. ‘It’s kind of small. I’d feel like a student in her first apartment again. Anything nearer here? Or in a less busy area?’

‘There’s a place in Brooklyn Heights that’s within your price range, but it’s tiny—ooh, this one is for rent or buy…two bedrooms, full bathroom suite…kitchen is kind of small but how much cooking do you do anyway?’

‘I made you pancakes, Specter. Button it. Call them up, arrange to take a look this afternoon. I want to inconvenience you guys as little as possible.’

‘What about rent costs?’

‘Eh…I can afford to buy outright if I find the right place. Like I told you, I saved a pretty decent amount over the years.’ She gestured to the one below the one he was looking at. ‘Let’s see that one to buy, too. I like the details around the fireplace.’

Harvey picked up his phone and went out into the back garden. The bookings were easy enough to arrange, but even after hanging up, he lingered outside, snippets of conversation drifting through the door to the outside.

‘You trying to leave us so soon?’

The sound of a pan being put on the draining board, the plastic scrubbing brush being set aside. ‘Mike…I don’t know if you think I can’t tell, but I can.’

‘Tell what?’

‘You see me a threat because Harvey and I used to date.’

‘I don’t—‘

‘Who are you talking to?’

Sighing. A low chuckle. ‘I know. It’s just…it’s incredibly hard to not feel intimidated by you when you’re, you know, you. And I’m...’ Harvey assumed from the lack of elaboration that Mike was gesturing through the silence.

Donna, choking out a laugh. ‘Oh god, Mike, are you fucking kidding me? I don’t even know if I want any kind of non-platonic relationship right now. But that’s besides the goddamn point. Harvey worships you.’

‘I know he loves me. And I shouldn’t worry. But, there’s things you can offer him that I can’t, like a family—’

‘Yeah, not gonna happen. I’ve got one good ovary and if the hot flashes I’ve been having for the last year are anything to go by, the old girl’s gonna go out of business soon, and I am A-OK with that. Moot point anyway. Me and Harvey are not romantically compatible, and that’s why everything went to shit. But you…you and him are like—like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich. One slide with the jelly, one with the peanut butter, and you smoosh them together and get this combo that’s just salty and sweet enough that it satisfies all your cravings at once. It’s just right. It works. Whereas me and Harvey were like two slices of bread, and a few stale salad ingredients stuffed between slices of a good cheese. Both of the sides are great, but all that gross miserable middle part was just right there at every bite and unavoidable.’

‘You do realise you compared relationships to sandwiches.’

‘Yeah, because sandwiches are amazing. Fuck this low-carb diet bullshit people keep pushing. Give me all the fucking bread in the world.’

Mike spluttering, laughing loudly. ‘You wait until you have a homemade fruit loaf. You’re gonna be a twenty pounds heavier before you leave here.’

‘I accept that fate if it means I can eat all of it. Anyway, I lost weight out of stress thanks to living with that fuck-wit, so I wouldn’t mind getting my ass and hips back.’

It was at that point Harvey decided to walk back in the room, and he walked back in to the two of them in an embrace. He cleared his throat. ‘Not trying to steal my man, are you?’

Donna smiled, let go of Mike’s shoulders. ‘As cute as he is, wouldn’t dream of it. Booked?’

‘Both this afternoon. They’re near enough that it should only be a ten-minute walk from one to the other, so I got them about forty minutes apart. That long enough?’

‘More than enough. I’ll know by the time I’ve walked through the front door.’

Harvey gestured to the room around them, the ceiling above. ‘You know you’re welcome to stay as long as you need.’

‘I know. You’ve told me like, ten times already today. But I always feel better having a place which is just my own, and by the way you keep groping Mike in the doorways, I don’t want to walk in on you two having sex.’

Mike spluttered, cheeks going so red they almost turned purple. ‘We—I—we have self-control—‘

‘Sure…and how much did you have to stuff that pillow into your mouth last night when he was blowing you?’

Harvey’s face dropped. ‘You heard us?’

‘The walls aren’t that thick! I couldn’t tell how long it went on, but I definitely heard Mike…finish.’ Donna smirked and stuck her tongue out between her teeth. ‘It was kind of hard to not hear when your headboard is pressed up against a wall in your guest room.’

Mike buried his face in his hands. ‘Oh god…I’m never having another orgasm ever again.’

As Donna cracked up laughing, and Mike tapped his head against the doorframe in horror, Harvey wondered exactly how many things would have to happen to make the floor swallow all three of them whole.

‘Well…that was…’

Mike unlocked the front door. ‘A disaster, total mess, royal fuck-up?’

‘Yeah, that too. I didn’t know closets were considered bedrooms now.’

‘Welcome back to New York.’

The places they’d viewed had both been decently sized in the descriptions. Upon entering, however, the odd shapes of the rooms, coupled with some of the inset sections of the walls, it became abundantly clear that the people who had measured had taken the measurements from within the tiny insets and alcoves. Harvey’s second apartment after college had been bigger than the space that it had allowed, and that hadn’t been all that much better than Mike’s the year he’d hired him.

Mike shook his head. ‘Did you notice how loud it was? I thought Brooklyn Heights was meant to be quiet?’

‘I don’t think that’s how it works when you’re going to be living next to a trombone player. But I get you. The floorboards, the doorframes, the windows…everything shook when you took a step. I felt like the Incredible Hulk walking through there.’

‘What about the bathroom in the second one?’

Donna suddenly fixed him with a glare. ‘No beautiful antique clawfoot tub should have to exist in an apartment where you can hear your neighbour taking a Herculean shit on the other side of the wall.’ She sighed, wandered over to the freezer and pulled out a pint of frozen yoghurt. It was the full-sugar kind; she was seriously pissed off. ‘Doesn’t exactly scream cheesy Danielle-Steel novel romance in there.’

Mike raised his eyebrows. ‘I thought you were off romance anyway?’

‘I am, but I might not feel the same in a few months. And if I’m having a sexy encounter in a bathtub, it’s not going to be in a bathroom with your constipated neighbour opening up his bomb-bay doors to the sound of Enya.’

Harvey choked on a laugh. The entire afternoon had been an exercise in futility, and he was sure that commiserating over a hard-earned cocktail would make them all feel a little better. ‘Peach lemonade anybody?’

‘Only if you’re spiking it with a lot of booze.’ Donna took the laptop through to the living room, and Harvey listened as she clicked through several listings, mumbling to herself as she worked. She looked comfortable, settled back into the city and in their company. It would be a shame for her to leave and live somewhere further away so fast; they’d only just begun to find the footing of their friendship again.

He sighed and tipped a few shots of rum into the blender jug of still lemonade and peach juice, the ice rattling and cracking as he stirred them into the mix. He followed it up with some vodka and blitzed the lot, then poured each of them a tall glass, garnishing them each with a maraschino cherry on the pointy end of a cocktail umbrella.

Harvey carried over the cocktail, placed it down on a coaster on the coffee table within Donna’s reach. ‘Have you looked within a couple of blocks from here? I’m sure I saw a for-sale sign in one of the windows a couple of days ago.’

‘It was a little small, and it only had one bedroom.’

‘You need the second one that bad?’

‘I’d really like a guest room, and a place where I can indulge my hobbies.’

‘Hobbies?’

‘If you must know, last year, I took a few art classes and got into oil painting. I’m not very good yet, but I like doing it, and it would be nice to have somewhere to paint in my spare time. I’ll show you when I unpack my boxes. If I unpack them all.’

‘You really don’t have to find a place so soon. But if you really want to, why look so far out? There’s got to be some places near here that would fit the bill.’ He pulled the laptop across to his own lap and typed in the name of the street. ‘See, there’s at least four listings, and that’s just within three blocks.’

Donna nodded thoughtfully. ‘Would be nice to have a little patch of green. Even a patio would be good, or a rooftop. I just don’t want to move close and then be all up in your hair all the time.’

‘You’re not up in our hair right now. True, you can hear us when we’re…’ Harvey made a vague motion with his hand.

‘Playing each other’s clarinets? Tooting each other’s horns?’

Harvey rolled his eyes, slowly closed his eyes. ‘Okay, that’s it. I’m getting soundproofing put in as soon as I can, and putting a ban on musical instrument-based innuendo.’

‘And in the meantime, I’ll still be looking for another apartment and making dirty jokes involving brass and woodwind instruments. But…I’ll take a look at what’s available near here too.’ She smiled, picking up her drink and sipping the syrupy drink. ‘You never know, maybe it’ll be fun living close to you guys.’

‘You’re not stealing my tomato plants.’

‘Spoilsport.’


	27. Chapter 27

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> This is the only chapter that references some of the things from the last seasons!
> 
> (Apologies for the lateness of the chapter - I was absolutely exhausted the past few days!)

Donna spent every second of her spare time with her nose buried in estate agent listings in the hunt for a suitable apartment. And then one day, on the last day of April, she announced she was going to be leaving again.

She popped the cork of the champagne bottle, pouring all of them a glass and handing them out. ‘I’m going to miss living with you two. Only a couple more days to make the most of my company, so use it wisely.’

Mike squeezed around her waist with one arm, holding the glass out of the way. ‘I can’t believe you’re moving out so soon.’

‘I’m not going to be that far away, Mike. You’re acting like I’m moving across the world.’ In spite of that, she hugged him back, planting a red-lipped kiss squarely on his cheek and leaving a crimson smudge. ‘I do appreciate that you’re going to miss me so much, though.’

‘So which one did you go for in the end? You didn’t let us go with you for most of the recent ones,’ Harvey asked.

‘It was the condo with the hardwood panels on the walls and recycled stained glass doors. I’ll send you the photos I took later. It’s got two bedrooms, two bathrooms, and the little terrace that links with the fire escape. Not as fancy as your old condo, but still very pretty all the same.’

Harvey raised his glass. ‘Impressive. You handled the legal stuff yet? I can get Travis to deal with it if you want.’

Donna shifted, sipped her champagne. Her cheeks were flushing, but it wasn’t the alcohol. ‘Actually, that’s all in progress, and I’ve found somewhere to stay until the last of it is done. I, uh, met up with Louis for a coffee recently, and he said he’d handle everything.’

Mike stopped in pouring them all a second glass. Harvey’s eyebrows shot up. ‘You saw Louis? How is he?’

‘He’s…okay. I knew he’d had a baby with Sheila, but I hadn’t realised they’d separated. I thought when they got married, that was it. He had his reasons, though.’

He shook his head and accepted the refilled flute Mike was handing him. ‘I haven’t spoken to him since he told me he couldn’t get to Rachel’s funeral because the baby was sick. He and Sheila are really separated?’

‘Yeah. He was really candid about it all when I asked. Apparently she…followed through with some non-consensual sexual encounter just before they got back together, and it happened once or twice while they were married, and he couldn’t take it happening again. He took Lucy and got out of there. From the sounds of it, he’s trying for full custody.’

Harvey’s heart sank. ‘Jesus…how long ago did that happen?’

‘About three months ago. He was going to try and get in contact with you to see if you wanted to meet up, but he’s been so busy looking after the baby, and finding a new place for himself, and sorting divorce proceedings, and working every hour under the sun trying to deal with his cases…poor guy’s one bad day away from a nervous breakdown, and yet he still offered to do the legal work for me. So while while that’s in progress and the decorators get the place touched-up, I said I’d go live with him and help look after Lucy while he’s at work.’

‘You gonna be okay taking care of a baby?’

She gestured to herself. ‘I’m Aunt Donna, I’ll be fine! It’ll be when she turns two that there’s an issue. Aunt Donna is great with babies, but not so good with toddlers.’

As she upended her second glass, Mike shot him a look, a smirk and an eyebrow raise over the top of his flute. They were definitely on the same page there; there was much, much more between Donna and Louis than she would openly admit.

Although it had happened a few times now, undressing in the same room and being able to slide under the sheets together still felt like a novelty.

He’d been quick to learn what Mike was like sharing a bed with someone. First came the arms around him, his head resting on his shoulder with a soft sigh. When he’d fallen asleep and Harvey was still lying awake, one leg would come up a little and wrap itself around one of his until their ankles brushed. And when Harvey awoke in the morning, it was always on his back, with Mike almost completely on top of him.

And occasionally, when he was up at the right time, rubbing a straining morning erection right up against his own.

That night, as he stripped down to his boxers, he caught Mike staring at him with an unreadable expression. Harvey tilted his head. ‘You okay there?’

‘Yeah, just…I don’t usually _really_ take the time to look at you like this. Goddamn, you’re hotter than I remember you being yesterday.’

Harvey smiled, gave Mike a once-over and smirking as his eyes caught the slight bulge in Mike’s pyjama pants. Since their relationship had become more physical, it had been an almost nightly arrangement for one of them to get down on their knees, and that night appeared to be no different as Mike crawled towards him across the mattress. He kissed at his chest a few times, then wrapped both arms around his neck. There was a pause, a few still moments of Mike looking deep into his eyes, mouth parted and brow relaxed. And then he beamed, let out a breath.

Harvey held him close, gave him a squeeze. ‘What’s up?’

Mike shook his head, smiling even wider, and cupped both of Harvey’s cheeks in his hands. ‘I love you.’

He could have had been hit by a train right then, and he wouldn’t have noticed. Harvey froze, staring back into the bright blue eyes that were blinking worriedly back at him. ‘What did you just…’

‘I love you. I love you, Harvey.’ Three times in the space of a minute. Harvey’s heart pounded, threatened to throb out of his chest. The response, something Mike already knew, was right there, on the tip of his tongue but refusing to come out.

The weight of his words in all their earnest clouded the part of his brain that remembered Donna could hear them, and Mike squeaked as he was tipped back onto the mattress and Harvey attacked his mouth over and over.

Every kiss tasted sweeter, every touch warmer and full of more meaning. The world was covered in rose glass, lit by candlelight, and it was as if for one second all of the horrible things going on in the world could stop for just a second and observe the best thing that had ever happened to him. The world spun on, cold and uncaring and unfeeling, but that didn’t matter.

There was no need for a deep discussion about what was going to happen. There was no talk, only action. They tugged away each others clothes, threw them to the side of the bed and across the room. Mike clambered over him, the familiar weight of his body in all its naked glory a sight to behold.

And then Mike grasped one of his hands in his own, guiding it around his body until the tips of his fingers were nestled against the crease of his buttocks. ‘I don’t want to wait anymore.’

It felt so natural, as if it was right where they were meant to end up. Harvey prepared him, relishing in the sweet gasps and the dampness growing between their bodies, and in turn, Mike responded so sweetly, canting back onto his fingers in earnest in a silent plea to hurry, to keep going.

And then came the moment of truth, the moment where everything clicked into place. Looking Mike in the eyes, he planted a kiss on his lips, another on his chin before using the thumb of his clean hand to grasp it. ‘Are you sure you’re ready for this?’

Mike leaned up, nudged his forehead against his shoulder, his neck, then touched it to Harvey’s own, eyes fluttering closed. ‘I want this. I love you, Harvey. I want you, please…’

That was all the confirmation he needed. Wrapping both of Mike’s legs around his waist, he gave his entrance a final nudge with his fingers, then lined himself up and slowly sank inside. When his hips were pressed up against Mike’s buttocks, he held still, breathing hard. It wasn’t just for Mike’s comfort; Mike’s body was hot against him, tensing and relaxing around his encased length in an erratic non-rhythm, and it was all he could do to hold back, to not just start animalistically pounding into him with abandon until they were both an ecstatic mess.

Mike leaned up, kissed him and gasped shakily against his mouth. ‘Ah…you’re—you’re thicker than your fingers.’

Harvey cupped his cheek, rubbed the tips of their noses together. ‘Am I hurting you? Do you want me to stop?’

‘No no no, no, don’t you fucking dare. Move. Please, please, fuck please move.’

The reality beat any dream or fantasy that his mind had ever conjured. Harvey held Mike’s gaze, stared back into his eyes and held his gaze as slid out almost all the way, then slowly pushed back inside again. Mike’s mouth curled into a smile as he moaned, but he could tell it was with a modicum of restraint; he clearly remembered their guest in the next room.

Harvey wondered somewhere in the back of his mind whether Mike might change his mind about the encounter, ask him to stop and pull out halfway. But the request never came. Instead, Mike babbled,whispered nonsense against his lips as he sank deeper and thrusted faster, whimpered by his ear as he circled his hips in the way he knew would both put the right pressure on his prostate and press his abdomen repeatedly against his length. It had already been leaking, smearing pre-ejaculate up his belly when he’d pressed inside, and it was barely a few minutes of gyrating and thrusting before Mike’s eyes lit up and he shuddered, tightened, and shot everything he had between their bodies as he rode out the sensation against him.

Harvey grinned, breathed raggedly as Mike went limp in his arms. ‘You okay?’

‘God, yes.’

‘You won’t mind if I make you come again then?’ Before he could comment or protest, he cut him off by pulling out and slamming back inside. Whatever Mike had been about to say turned into another moan, louder and unfettered. Any thought or care about being heard by other people was being fucked right out of him, and neither cared. The moans continued, growing louder and broken and nonsensical, and Harvey picked his moment carefully, flipped their bodies right as Mike needed to stop to draw breath and pulled him down by his waist so he sank even deeper. One orgasm down, Mike could barely hold himself up astride Harvey’s hips, but after a few seconds came to life once more, wriggling awkwardly down a little before finding his feet and meeting each thrust up with an equally enthusiastic thrust down and a satisfied grunt.

Harvey wanted it to last forever. He wished that their energy could be boundless, just to see Mike’s face and hear his voice in the throes of an orgasm that shook him to his bones. He wanted to have the stamina to make love to him again and again, to spread his own legs for Mike and feel him return the favour with equal fervour until he was a flushed, panting mess. But all good things had to come to an end, and as Mike bounced on his cock faster, erratically, gasping loud with half-lidded eyes and a wide smile as he began to stroke himself, Harvey could already feel the point of no return gripping him. He grabbed at Mike’s sweat-soaked thighs with strong hands, held on for dear life as the familiar clenching and tightening began to nag at him, thrusted harder and faster. ‘Mike…I’m gonna—fuck, I’m coming—‘

‘Come, come, oh god—‘ And Mike lifted a hand to his own lips, shuddering and mouthing against his knuckles and palm, and Harvey looked down just in time to see Mike come again untouched, a weak final spurt as his hips and thighs and buttocks quaked euphorically.

It was that sight, of Mike quivering around him again and basking in the second wave of afterglow that finally tipped him over the edge. Harvey came hard, seeing flashes of light like explosions beneath his eyelids, and he held Mike down on his cock through it all, filling him with everything he had.

They lay there together for a long time afterwards, breathing deep and just looking back at each other through sleepy eyes. There was an issue with a wet patch on the sheets that would need to be dealt with, a definite need for them to both to shower the sweat and the saliva and the come off of their bodies—and with it a fiendish musing in Harvey’s head that wondered if Mike could have another orgasm in the shower by his fingers with the way eased by his own release—but neither of them seemed to want to or be able to move.

Mike’s hand sought his, ignoring the lube still clinging to his fingers and interlinking his own with them.The wedding ring brushed against him, the metal warm and smooth. It would always hurt to remember Rachel was gone, but it no longer hurt to remember the ring would always be there.

Mike squeezed his hand, and Harvey squeezed back, kissed his knuckles. He rubbed the wedding ring under his thumb. ‘Was it good?’

‘Amazing. You were worth the wait.’

It had been a long wait for Mike, an even longer one for him. But as Mike fell asleep in his arms, still dirty and exhausted, Harvey knew every second of waiting that had led up to that moment had been completely worth it.


	28. Epilogue

‘Mike, you ready yet? We still have to pick up Donna and Louis!’

On cue, Mike appeared at the top of the stairs, still fumbling with the bow tie in hand. ‘I’ve got a tie that doesn’t want to knot itself, and my hair keeps sticking up at the front.’

Harvey rolled his eyes, but smiled all the same. ‘You know Go-Eun will kill you if we’re late to her wedding.’

‘Well, you can tell her and Hiro that it’s your fault later.’ Mike rushed down the stairs towards him, holding the tie in his hands. ‘You can do this in the cab.’

‘How is it my fault when you’re the one who climbed into my lap last night, undid his pants, and begged me to…now, what was it—‘

‘Don’t—‘

‘—“Fuck me so hard I can still feel your dick in my ass when the ceremony starts.” I don’t know why you get so embarrassed about it. I love it when you’re all dirty-talk power-bottom on me.’

A pink flush filled Mike’s cheeks. ‘It’s harder to say or hear what I said when I’m horny, when I’m no longer horny. Anyway, I maintain it’s your fault.’

‘Hmm,’ Harvey nosed against his cheek, his jaw, and followed the line of it to Mike’s ear, ‘What if I say that I love it when you tell me you want to be on top by pulling my ass against your dick in the shower?’

Mike swallowed, shuddered into his touch. ‘No…no, we don’t have time. We have to pick up Donna and Louis.’

‘Mm. I could just tell them to get a cab straight there instead. That would give us at least…fifteen minutes to do it on the couch.’

‘I don’t want to be all sweaty during the ceremony. And people will know, they’ll smell it on us.’

Harvey pulled back, and smirked. ‘I know. I just wanted to see you get hot and bothered. That being said, if you feel like doing that later...’

‘Oh, you can count on it.’ Mike pulled back, kissed him fully before letting him go and glancing at his watch. ‘Cab’s gonna be here in a minute. Wanna get in any more dirty comments before it arrives?’

‘Yeah, one more—tonight when we get home, I want you to bend me over and take me right here at this table while licking maple syrup off my back.’

Mike gulped, breathed deep. ‘Oh you bastard.’

Harvey lifted Mike’s hand to his mouth and thumbed over the new engagement ring accompanying his old wedding ring. ‘You know you love me anyway.’

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Hope you enjoyed the fic! This is my longest work to date, and while it's definitely not perfect, it was a fun (if challenging) write!
> 
> (EDIT 6th October 2020: I definitely think on some level I was inspired by [Joni Beloni's](https://archiveofourown.org/users/Joni_Beloni/pseuds/jonius_belonius) fic 'Nothing Like We Used to Be'. So I am going to credit Joni for me unconsciously ripping off her fic! Here's a link: [Nothing Like We Used to Be](https://archiveofourown.org/works/14888600/chapters/34480526))


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